Pre-order “Digital Accessibility Ethics”

Lainey Feingold, Reginé Gilbert, and Chancey Fleet gathered 36 authors across 10 countries and a commonwealth to write 32 chapters about ethics in digital accessibility. I am one of those 36 authors.

Book cover, “Digital Accessibility Ethics: Disability Inclusion in All Things Tech” set in blue text above a painting featuring bright arcs of yellow, orange, blue, turquoise, pink, and purple; the lower half of these colors show abstract figures, circles, and building-like shapes and the text “Edited by Lainey Feingold, Reginé Gilbert, Chancey Fleet” and “CRC Press, Taylor & Francis Group.”
The painting on the cover was created by Ana Maria Vidalon, a Spanish-speaking artist with a disability originally from Peru. She now lives in the United States and is associated with Creativity Explored, a studio in San Francisco that “partners with artists with developmental disabilities to celebrate and nurture the creative potential in all of us.” The cover image, untitled, was created in 2018. Ana Maria had her first solo show at the studio in 2021.

The book introduces the first (that I’ve heard of) Digital Accessibility Ethics Framework. It’s a three-part tool intended to influence, change, & disrupt patterns of disability exclusion. #DigitalAccessibilityEthics is now a hashtag on Masto (try your own instance), Bluesky, and LinkedIn.

My chapter covers overlays and their false marketing claims.

The goal of the Framework, and the goal of the book, is to help make the digital world more accessible to disabled people across the globe and to help organizations mitigate the risks of disability exclusion.

Get the details from the publisher, Taylor and Francis, and pre-order it from Amazon or your local independent book retailer. Pre-orders are good as it helps the publisher do things like know that I’m awesome at marketing the book.

Table of Contents

Lainey gathered the LinkedIn profiles of all the authors (I haven’t taken the time to track down their personal pages), so I linked them from their chapters.

From the Publisher

Digital Accessibility Ethics is a practical guide with an urgent goal: to help end tech exclusion of 1.3 billion people across the world with disabilities.

The book introduces the first Digital Accessibility Ethics Framework – an action-oriented, three-part tool designed to influence, change, and disrupt patterns of exclusion with values, actions, and questions. This edited collection is written by 39 authors from 10 countries and one commonwealth, the majority of whom are disabled.

The editors and authors have over 600 years of combined accessibility and disability advocacy experience. They offer and apply an ethics lens that supports disabled people’s right to fully participate in every facet of digital life. It is a lens that helps organizations reduce the financial, legal, privacy, safety, and other risks and harms of disability exclusion.

Through stories, recommendations, strategies, and other guidance, the book looks at a wide range of topics through the Digital Accessibility Ethics Framework: from gaming and smart cities to hackathons, procurement, and cybersecurity. From accessibility practitioner burnout, to robots, artificial intelligence, workplace software, aerospace, design, healthcare, open source, emergency preparedness, legal ethics, publishing, and much more.

This book is for leaders in all these fields. And it is for all technologists, educators, students, marketers, policy makers and everyone who has ever posted on social media or sent an email. It encourages us to stop and ask ourselves: who are we excluding when digital accessibility is ignored? Who are we harming, what are we risking, by our decisions?

As the world grows more digital, as AI is marketed everywhere, and as the number of people with disabilities continues to grow, there has never been a more urgent time to expose, explore, and act at the intersection of ethics, disability, and digital accessibility. Digital Accessibility Ethics offers a roadmap to show us the way.

An accessible digital version of the book will be available, upon publication.

Wrap-up

If you read this far, you may have skipped that link to pre-order it from Amazon, though you could also contact your local independent book retailer and ask them to pre-order it.

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