Meredith Broussard, author, "More than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech"

• More than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech, by Meredith Broussard

• meredithbroussard.com, Meredith’s site

• Interview of Meredith in Technology Review (March 10, 2023)

• Meredith’s first appearance on Techtonic (May 28, 2018), speaking about her book “Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World”

On disability dongles

• Disability Dongle (by Liz Jackson, Alex Haagaard, and Rua Williams, Apr 19, 2022) offers several case studies and this definition:

Disability Dongle: A well intended elegant, yet useless solution to a problem we never knew we had. Disability Dongles are most often conceived of and created in design schools and at IDEO.

One case study concerns “haptic footwear”: Lecha is a “smart footwear company” that “seeks to create an intuitive and user-friendly wearable technology for visually-impaired people.” But as with other disability dongles, it seemed to overlook the reality on the ground:

Lechal’s marketing narrative ignores the possibility that “few had thought to tackle this problem” because it is not, in fact, a problem. Blind and low-vision people have been using white canes for such a long time because they’re reliable, reasonably cost-effective tools that meet their needs.

White canes! Much like the wheelchair ramp that Meredith talks about in the interview: simple, low-tech, low-cost, and effective.

In other news

• Not magic: Opaque AI tool may flag parents with disabilities: “Over the past six years, Allegheny County has served as a real-world laboratory for testing AI-driven child welfare tools that crunch reams of data about local families to try to predict which children are likely to face danger in their homes. Today, child welfare agencies in at least 26 states and Washington, D.C., have considered using algorithmic tools, and jurisdictions in at least 11 have deployed them, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.”