Knowledge practices of people with disabilities and the role of ICT

Abstract

Knowledge is generally acknowledged as essential for everyday life and a requisite for quality of life. Although arguably more so for people with disabilities, disabled people are often excluded due to their impairments. Worsening this exclusion, the expected benefits of information and communications technologies (ICT) in enabling knowledge practices and for assisting disabled people has not been realized as evidenced by a lower adoption rate of ICT by people with disabilities when compared to the adoption rate of ICT by non-disabled people. A review of literature identified two concomitant shortcomings. Firstly, there is a dearth of knowledge available on how disabled people gather and share knowledge, with research about knowledge practices focused predominantly on organizations and largely disregarding knowledge practices of the individual. Secondly, despite the fact that ICT is recognised as important both for disabled people and for knowledge practices, the relationships between disabled people, ICT, and knowledge practices are fundamentally unexplored. Considering information elemental for quality of life, this paper proposes a conceptual model for informing an investigation into the knowledge practices of disabled people and the role that information and communication technology plays in these practices.