Living in the State of Stuck: How Assistive Technology Impacts the Lives of People With Disabilities by Marcia J. Scherer, is an exploration of the complex relationship between people with disabilities and assistive technology. Dr. Scherer, of the National Technical Institute for the Deaf and the Rochester Institute of Technology, provides at once a comprehensive history of assistive technology and powerful argument for a person-first approach to the use of that technology.
Her chosen focus is a rare one: how people with disabilities relate to access technology. Scherer explains why people with disabilities so often don’t want to completely replace human assistance with technology. There are issues with privacy, dignity, self-sufficiency, and learned helplessness—but at the same time, there are problems with government benefits, funding, service animals, and the technology itself. She traces assistive technology through the past two decades, then discusses the implications of this technology. In the process, she explains how loved ones can better understand the issues that arise from living with a disability and “needing” these devices.
Scherer discusses how access technology can define the way people with disabilities interact with the general public, which affects their self-image. She compares the different views that people with disabilities hold about compensating technologies and why one third of all access technology is abandoned. Most importantly, she explains how to remedy the problem by making sure the proper product is recommended and purchased.
In Scherer’s own words, this book “shows, how, paradoxically, the more technology became available and the more free from limitations individuals became, the more stuck they seemed.” A unique, well-researched book that will help anyone, with a disability or not, deal with the physical and emotional adjustments to a life with assistive technology.
Publisher: Brookline Books
Publish date: January 15, 2005
250 pages
ISBN-10: 1571290982
ISBN-13: 978-1571290984
