Inclusion in the Third Wave: Access to Experience

In this chapter, we examine inclusive design of technology for people with disabilities in the context of the Third Wave HCI. As technology becomes more integrated into our lives beyond work, there are increasing opportunities for people with disabilities to have new experiences through technology. However, we argue design knowledge and practice in inclusive design has lagged behind the broader HCI field in two different, but related, ways. First, when new technology is released, an implementation lag in designs for access and enablement invariably lead to late adoption of technology for people with disabilities. Secondly, this implementation lag has resulted in a conceptual lag, where to solve these problems the research field remains grounded in HCI methodologies from First and Second Waves. This results in a reliance in checklist style engineering approaches that are unable to properly support user experience design. We explore these ideas in the two examples of the web and digital games, and argue that while we must not supplant previous approaches, we need to decouple the implementation lag from the conceptual lag to change inclusive design research and practice. We argue that we must not only plan for accessibility, but instead adopt pluralistic approaches that recognise the diversity of lived experiences of people with disabilities, and use them to design options for people to customise their own inclusive experiences.