‹Programming› 2026
Mon 16 - Fri 20 March 2026 Munich, Germany
Tue 17 Mar 2026 13:30 - 13:50 at Seminar Room 115 - Talks II

he social model of disability holds that disability is produced by environments, not by bodies — that when software fails to accommodate a person’s needs, the envi­ ronment is disabling them. We argue that the dominant organization of computing produces such interaction mis­ matches structurally: the commodity form of software requires a standardized consumer, and everyone whose needs diverge from this imagined subject is disabled by the software environment. The substrates research community has identified properties — disclosure, composability, mal­ leability — that would address this, but the commodity form actively selects against these properties because they dissolve the boundaries on which exchange value depends. This raises a question: how can infrastructure organized against the grain of commodity logic be made durable? We find a precedent in accessibility infrastructure — sustained not by patronage but by the organized counter­power of disability rights movements. Through Allio, a system for cross­application augmentation built on accessibility APIs, we illustrate both what this foundation makes possible and where its limits lie. We argue that the accessibility case reframes the substrates programme’s central challenge as political­economic: the question of who sustains substrate infrastructure, and through what social mechanisms, is as important as the question of what properties it should have.

Tue 17 Mar

Displayed time zone: Amsterdam, Berlin, Bern, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna change