Disability Studies at UW: What is it, How did it Develop, and What We Hope
To Do?
Dennis Lang, Associate Director, Disability Studies
- The Disability Studies program is a multi-campus, interdisciplinary
program exploring society's understanding of disability
- Web site is at http://depts.washington.edu/disstud/
- Inspired in part by the Society for Disability Studies
http://www.disstudies.org/
- Topics studied include "the cultural construct of disability, social
justice, and disability policy, and the intersections of disability,
race, gender, sex, age, class and other markers of diversity and
difference."
- Social justice
- Policy
- Law, society, and justice
- Comparative ideas
- Dance
- Business
- Currently, Disability Studies offers two courses of study:
- Disability Studies Minor
- Individualized Studies Major in Disability Studies
- The program has recently received a limited amount of permanent
funding.
- Faculty participating in the program are from many departments
- Rehabilitation Medicine, Law, Slavic Languages and Literature,
American Sign Language, Philosophy, Social Work, Education, Civil
and Environmental Engineering, History, Comparative History of
Ideas (CHID)
- Currently has about 20 students a quarter
- Disability Studies is currently exploring moving their Web site to Drupal
- Hoping for easier site management, accessible design, and tools that
will help build social connections
- Discussion:
- Drupal out-of-the-box is very standards compliant and thus
generally starts out as reasonably accessible and intelligible to
assistive technologies
- However, it is easy to add modules or make modifications that
interfere with accessibility
- Drupal offers many modules supporting social interactions, such
as new feed generators and news feed readers. You can weave
interconnections with other sites that go beyond simple links.
- Drupal does require management. Security updates come out
regularly. The site manager is informed about the updates and it is
wise to install them.
- Drupal has a customization system based on "intercept and
override" where the default site settings and configurations are
intercepted and overridden by customizations, leaving the core
installation unmodified. This approaches allows core installation
updates without disturbing the customizations (usually).
- A large number of themes are available. They are installed by
placing them in specific subdirectories and then selecting them
from the administrator menus
- The Zen theme (http://drupal.org/project/zen) is a very
standards-compliant Drupal them that is well documented and
flexible
- The UW Standing Committee on Disability Issues is being rejuvenated.
Dennis is looking for people who are interested in serving on the
committee. Contact him at 206-522-3104 or dlang@u.washington.edu for more
information.
- Sushil K. Oswal, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Technical
Communication in the Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences Program at UW
Tacoma is interested in studying the topic of accessibility.
Anyone interested in working with him can contact him at
253-692-4308 or oswal@u.washington.edu.
