Disability Rights Are Technology Rights

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At EFF, our work always begins from the same place: technological self-determination. That’s the right to decide which technology you use, and how you use it. Technological self-determination is important for every technology user, and it’s especially important for users with disabilities.

Assistive technologies are a crucial aspect of living a full and fulfilling life, which gives people with disabilities motivation to be some of the most skilled, ardent, and consequential technology users in the world. There’s a whole world of high-tech assistive tools and devices out there, with disabled technologists and users intimately involved in the design process.

The accessibility movement’s slogan, “Nothing about us without us,” has its origins in the first stirrings of European democratic sentiment in sixteenth (!) century and it expresses a critical truth: no one can ever know your needs as well you do. Unless you get a say in how things work, they’ll never work right.

So it’s great to see people with disabilities involved in the design of assistive tech, but that’s where self-determination should start, not end. Every person is different, and the needs of people with disabilities are especially idiosyncratic and fine-grained. Everyone deserves and needs the ability to modify, improve, and reconfigure the assistive technologies they rely on.

Unfortunately, the same tech companies that devote substantial effort to building in assistive features often devote even more effort to ensuring that their gadgets, code and systems can’t be modified by their users.

Take streaming video. Back in 2017, the W3C finalized “Encrypted Media Extensions” (EME), a standard for adding digital rights management (DRM) to web browsers. The EME spec includes numerous accessibility features, including facilities for including closed captioning and audio descriptive tracks.

But EME is specifically designed so that anyone who reverse-engineers and modifies it will fall afoul of Section 1201 of […]
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