Consulting

DisCoTec Center is not an assistive tech center, but a community center with a tech, justice, and cross-community solidarity focus where disabled people are the experts, not the subjects. In DisCoTec Consulting, we focus on cross-disability research consulting.

A lot of technology, infrastructure, and science doesn’t actually address our community’s needs, desires, or ability to lead good lives. Too often, projects in science and engineering about disability are lauded without a prospective disabled users ever in the loop in a meaningful way and focus narrowly on one disability sub-type. But most disabled people are multiply disabled and have big opinions about what we want to use and create in our lives.

Disability-forward research consulting focuses on recruiting disabled people as experts and consultants, rather than human subjects or test pilots, to offer insights, questions, and feedback. We like projects at earlier stages, and like to work with researchers who welcome our unique perspectives. We seek cross-disability and diverse groups of disabled people, including people with multiple disabilities, to talk to each other and researchers about science and technology.

Technology for disability is like any other form of technology: it should suit users’ needs, be affordable and safe, and be guided by cultural and community values to enable human flourishing. There’s a value in playing with new ideas and objects, in learning from each other in cross-disability teams, and in setting up consulting sessions that are set up with disability in mind in order to afford a wide variety of disability types and perspectives.