Disability, AI, and the Limits of Accessibility
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Disability, AI, and the Limits of Accessibility
by Alan Foley
Alan Foley is an associate professor in education and disability studies at Syracuse University. His research explores the intersection of disability and technology with a focus on the impact of digital technologies on disabled people’s lives.
Recently, I’ve worked with two amazing colleagues to publish articles exploring the relationship among disability, artificial intelligence, and emerging educational technologies. The articles approach this relationship from slightly different but related perspectives; however, they share a concern with how technology both reproduces and shapes understandings of disability. Together, they move from an analysis of how educational AI reproduces ableism toward a framework educators and institutions can use to recognize and resist it.
In Disabling AI: Power, Exclusion, and Disability (open access), Fasika Melese and I explore how AI technologies in education reproduce systemic inequalities by embedding ableist and normative assumptions into their design and use. We draw on theories from Critical Disability Studies, disability justice, and intersectionality to develop a theoretical approach to studying how AI can marginalize different ways of learning and knowing. Instead of seeing AI harms as inevitable or technical, we explore how policy, ideology, and social context shape these systems.
In it, we look at a variety of technologies (including chatbots, learning analytics, robotic tutors, and intelligent tutoring systems) to identify patterns of sociotechnical ableism, algorithmic marginalization, and limited technological agency. We also connect educational technosolutionism to broader narratives surrounding artificial general intelligence, which often obscure disabled knowledge while treating human variation as a problem for technology to address. We conclude with a call for participatory, justice-oriented approaches that center disabled people and resist the erasure of disability from imagined technological futures.
In DISCO-Tech: A Framework for Resisting Ableism in Emerging Technologies (open access), Beth Ferri and I take a similar approach by asking how educators might evaluate technologies differently. The DISCO-Tech framework is a method for evaluating how digital tools affect disabled students and faculty. Many educational technologies claim to provide universal access, but these systems often treat disabilities as problems to fix rather than as natural variations in human diversity.
DISCO-Tech (DISability COnservation Technology Framework) is a tool for better understanding how educational technologies treat disability. In this paper we ask whether a technology conserves disability as a valued form of human diversity or pushes disabled people toward normalization, and whether it reflects disabled people’s lived experiences or idealized narratives of access. DISCO-Tech reveals how technologies that appear inclusive can erase disability identity, impose normative expectations, and create new burdens for disabled people.
Both of these articles argue that educational technologies do more than provide or deny access. These technologies shape institutional perceptions of student capability, determine whose knowledge informs technology selection, and influence which forms of human diversity receive institutional support. We wrote these articles as resources for educators looking to develop a more critical engagement with emerging technologies, as well as for those interested in the possibilities that arise when disabled knowledge informs this engagement.
References
Foley, A., & Melese, F. (2025). Disabling AI: Power, exclusion, and disability. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 1–22.
Foley, A., & Ferri, B. A. (2026). DISCO-Tech: A framework for resisting ableism in emerging technologies. Teachers College Record, 1–29.