IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2022 - 13

Book Review
Accessible America: A History
of Disability and Design-Bess
Williamson (New York, NY, USA:
New York Univ. Press, 2020, 279 pp.)
Reviewed by Zihao Lin
Department of Comparative Human Development
University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637 USA
 Curb-Cuts by the streets, subway elevators,
automatic door openers in buses and buildings-
Bess Williamson's Accessible America wonderfully
unpacks the sociopolitical histories of designs that
are now ubiquitous in the contemporary American
society. The conception of the built environment
as filled with physical barriers that can be removed
through proactive design interventions, as Williamson
argues, is a new consciousness emerging in the
aftermath of the Second World War when myriad
soldiers returned to the United States. Injured and
newly disabled veterans' demand for prostheses
and accommodations in the built environment presented
the immediacy of the issue to many stakeholders-military
hospitals, prosthesis experts and
manufacturers, state officials, and disabled veterans
themselves.
This historical moment, presented in Chapter 1,
sets off Williamson's story of how the intention and
materiality of accessible design evolve through the
second half of the 20th century into our contemporary
moment. Her sites of analysis include the
community journals of " polio survivors " who wrote
about " Do it yourself " tinkering of home objects in
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2022.3197121
Date of current version: 16 September 2022.
September 2022
the 1950s (Chapter 3), the ground-breaking projects
of " rehabilitation " and " independent living " at two
university campuses (Chapters 2 and 4), the public
debates about federal disability rights regulations
after the civil rights movement in the 1970s (Chapter
5), and the designers' effort to propose " universal "
design as an alternative philosophy of accessible
design in the late 20th century (Chapter 6).
The book does not take a celebratory tone toward
the hard-won status quo. Quite unlike Library Journal's
comment on the back cover that " the United
States has led the world globally toward physical
access and accessibility as acceptable and admirable
natural and civil rights, " Williamson remains
deeply reflective of the historically contingent conditions
of the access projects throughout the book. She
keenly reminds readers that the GI Bill-the legal
predecessor of the later Architectural Barriers Act in
1968 and the American with Disabilities Act (ADA)
in 1990-incorporated several specific principles
that profoundly shaped the later trajectory of disability
inclusion: self-reliance, racialized and gendered
individualism, and middle-class consumerism.
As Williamson notes, " to be a white, middle-class
veteran or polio survivor in the 1950s was to be in a
place of privilege, but also of pressure. " For example,
state officials and lawmakers' special attention
to male and predominantly white paralytic soldiers'
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IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2022

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