Book Recommendations for your 2025 reading goals
My top picks to learn more about inclusion, accessibility and ableism this year. Anyone wants to start a book club?
It’s that time of year when so many of us decide that we will read a specific number of books this year. I hear 25 is a trendy pick, alongside the usual 50, 52, and 100, because some bookworms truly know no restraint (I raise my heftiest hardcover to you). So let me enable you in this endeavor!
Disability Visibility
I loved this one because it was hard to read! Hard in the sense that I couldn’t read it continuously, I had to put it down after a few chapters at a time to stomach what I just learned. At the time I was approaching the topic of disability from the web accessibility aspect, and these stories made me understand that accessibility and inclusion are different things. While access is a pre-requisite to achive inclusion (real inclusion, not just performative DEI), the accessibility bubble still fails to understand many problems the disabled community has been dealing with for decades.
Each chapter is written by a different author and accordingly gives the reader a first-person perspective of the lived experience with different disabilities. What I also loved: Unless the author decided to disclose their disabilities, you won’t know. This puts the focus on the barrieres and internal experience rather than how disability can be quantified on the outside. It sounds obvious now, but at the time it made me understand that I needed to focus on the barrieres, not the disability.
The topics are heavy and accordingly labeled with trigger warnings at the top of each chapter, so you know which chapters to skip if need be.
Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement
A manifesto exploding what we think we know about disability, and arguing that disabled people are the real experts when it comes to technology and disability.
When bioethicist and professor Ashley Shew became a self-described “hard-of-hearing chemobrained amputee with Crohn’s disease and tinnitus,” there was no returning to “normal.” Suddenly well-meaning people called her an “inspiration” while grocery shopping or viewed her as a needy recipient of technological wizardry. Most disabled people don’t want what the abled assume they want—nor are they generally asked. Almost everyone will experience disability at some point in their lives, yet the abled persistently frame disability as an individual’s problem rather than a social one.
This was submitted by a reader and went straight to my TBR. Anyone wants to start a book club with me?
Wer Inklusion will, findet einen Weg. Wer sie nicht will, findet Ausreden.
Unfortunately not translated to other languages yet, but the one I recommend to everyone who understands German because it demonstrates the need for inclusion on a structural level. With plenty of footnotes, it is also a great starting point to help you dive deeper into different topics discussed in the book!
Wie eine zugänglichere Welt uns alle bereichert.
Warum tun wir uns mit Inklusion so schwer? Was bedeutet Barrierefreiheit eigentlich wirklich? Und wie gehen wir mit unserem eigenen internalisierten und dem Ableismus anderer um?
Raúl Aguayo-Krauthausen ist aktiver Verfechter von Inklusion und Teilhabe von Menschen mit Behinderungen in allen Lebensbereichen und kämpft gegen Diskriminierung und für Sichtbarkeit. Nach zwei Jahrzehnten Arbeit in diesem Bereich stellt er nun erstmals seine Ansichten und Lösungsansätze in „Wer Inklusion will, findet einen Weg. Wer sie nicht will, findet Ausreden.“ vor.
Inklusion ist ein Menschenrecht, das leider oft vernachlässigt wird. Ich rufe dazu auf, Behinderung als eine Eigenschaft wie die Haarfarbe zu betrachten und fordere ein Umdenken.
In seinem Buch sind auch Gespräche mit Expert*innen auf dem Gebiet der Inklusion enthalten. So bietet es einen umfassenden Einblick in das Thema sowie Lösungsmöglichkeiten für bestehende Missstände.
Auch als Hörbuch auf Spotify.
Web Accessibility Cookbook
It’s an honorable mention because as the title says, it’s a cookbook to help you cook up inclusive experiences! It contains too many instructions to be considered as a book you read once and are done with, it’s one to come back to for reference again and again.
Disability is Human
Accessibility has the power to move the needle in your life and work — and help the people around you be their best selves.
Author Dr. Stephanie Cawthon draws upon more than 25 years of experience as a professional educator, groundbreaking researcher, and educational psychologist who dispels myths and raises expectations about disabled people. In Disability Is Human, she brings the same energy and insights from her popular presentations and workshops in nearly every industry — where Dr. Cawthon has empowered, encouraged, and supported thousands of people in the journey toward greater access.
Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design
An easy read for in-between. I won’t lie, this is one of those non-fiction books that could have been just a few blog posts as well. But hey, if you want to make it to 100 books this year, you may need something to get you out of a reading slump at some point. And this could be it!
What I really liked about it, was that it takes a broader approach to inclusion. When we zone in too much on one aspect, we forget that no one issue exists in a vaccuum. Inclusion needs intersectionality.
Interesting, yet not too hard to digest. Read it on your commute to the office and use it as a small talk basis before your daily stand up meeting begins!
Thank you for reading A11y News!
A11y News turns one today, and I wanted to say Thank You all 154 of you who joined me in the past year. It started from the idea to combine the events I would usually share with specific people through Linkedin DMs & Co into one mailing list, and grew into an events announcement and blog mix.
My wishes for this 2nd year are to include more events outside central Europe, as well as more regular remote events outside the English and German language bubble. For this I will need your help: If you are organizing a webinar, meetup, round table, or even a one-off event related to accessibility, inclusion, assistive tech (or any of the topics for which you subscribed here in the first place), send me your event and an abstract about it in the event language. I will include it in the monthly newsletter! If it already went out that month: Post your event in the comments. It’s not shameless self-promotion if it’s explicitly invited, so go for it and find your people!