AI as a Tool for Disabled Liberation: Building Our Own Adjustments

25 November 2026 – 9AM

AI systems are built on a fantasy of the “normal” user — someone who moves through the world without friction, whose body and mind require no accommodation. Disabled people have never waited for institutions to design for them; adaptation, workaround, and self-built infrastructure are already a core disabled practice.

This workshop treats AI as the latest tool in that tradition. Working individually or in small groups, attendees will use Claude hands-on to design a practical tool, workaround, or process that addresses a specific access barrier in their work, advocacy, or daily life: building the adjustment they actually need, rather than the accommodation an institution is willing to grant. Attendees leave with a working artifact and a repeatable approach for building more.

Learning objectives

By the end of this workshop, attendees will be able to:

  • Explain how crip theory reframes AI’s relationship to disability — from a compliance and accessibility-features lens to a structural design question — and identify where current AI development still assumes a “normal” user.
  • Use Claude hands-on to build a practical tool or workaround that addresses a real access barrier in their work, advocacy, or daily life, and that they can take away and keep using.
  • Apply a working framework for assessing whether a given AI tool or system expands disabled autonomy or extracts from it, and for negotiating self-determined adjustments rather than requesting sanctioned ones.

Aubrey Blanche

Aubrey Blanche believes most organisations don’t fail on their values because they lack good intentions: they fail because their systems were never designed to live up those values.

Blanche is the founder of The Mathpath, a systems design practice that helps organisations govern AI ethically and accountably — attending in equal measure to the technology and to the people it affects.

She is also Director of Ethical Advisory and Strategic Partnerships at The Ethics Centre, a non-profit dedicated to bringing ethics to the centre of everyday life. She was previously an executive at Atlassian and Culture Amp. She is completing a Master’s in AI Ethics & Society at the University of Cambridge, with a focus on how AI impacts and is shaped by queer and disabled users.