Social Accessibility

A design paradigm introduced by Shinohara and colleagues emphasizing that assistive technologies must be designed for the social worlds they will be used within, not just for functional task completion. Social accessibility recognizes that assistive technologies often have a secondary function of marking their users as disabled, which can affect social interactions and identity expression. The paradigm calls on designers to attend to how their tools affect users' social experiences, stigma, and identity—not just whether the tools technically enable access to information or activities.