Disabled innovator

A disabled person who creates, develops, and disseminates technology or solutions that address accessibility needs, drawing on their lived experience and situated knowledge. Disabled innovators challenge the dominant paradigm where accessibility technology is designed "for" disabled people by non-disabled professionals, instead demonstrating that disabled people are creators, not just consumers, of access. Historical examples include Louis Braille (the Braille writing system) and Robert Weitbrecht (the teletypewriter/TTY). Present-day examples include the creators of NVDA, SoundPrint, DeafFriendly, and Emacspeak. Disabled innovators' technologies tend to embody values of community, empowerment, and structural change rather than normalization.