...a dongle is an adaptor and a Disability Dongle is adaptive; both are created to make their subject compatible with a normative system.
This makes it the perfect term for a very silly category of object, one which is implicated in a pattern of social extraction, production, and circulation that elicits laughter as a trauma response.
The functions of a Disability Dongle operate in tension with one another. To the disabled users they are ostensibly designed for (or “with”) they are at best speculative: promising in concept but in actuality unattainable. At worst, they enact normative or curative harm upon disabled users. At the same time, nondisabled people are not made aware that they have also become “users” through their reading and sharing of easily consumable, feel-good content. The Disability Dongle relies on their lack of fluency, so they don’t recognize that they’re being manipulated.
When a Disability Dongle is presumed to do good, our critiques inherently make us bad. As Sara Ahmed writes in Complaint, “To become a complainer is to become the location of a problem” (2021, 3).
Disability Dongles are contemporary fairy tales that appeal to the abled imagination by presenting a heroic designer-protagonist whose prototype provides a techno-utopian (re)solution to the design problem.
...another characteristic of the Disability Dongle: a cycle of repetition and replication that traps our collective imagination in a designerly Groundhog Day, as the same thing is invented for the first time over and over again.
In this paper, we practice citational justice by centering the perspectives of disabled thinkers, whether or not they are legitimized by the academy, and by using citations to hold academics and developers accountable for the consequences of their creations.