Accessible technology often gets abandoned not because it fails functionally, but because using it in front of others feels awkward, unprofessional, or attention-drawing — a dimension most design processes have no way to surface. The DSA Method Cards, tested with professional designers and master's students in a user-centered design course, give teams a concrete method for confronting the social cost of a design before it ships.

Disabled doctoral students perform a second, invisible job to make their formal accommodations actually work: scripting their own tools, training their own readers, scheduling around interpreter shortages. They absorb it so completely they stop recognizing it as labor, and the institutions that created the gap get to believe their accommodations are working.

Disabled doctoral students in computing don't measure inaccessibility against a standard; they measure it against what they watch their nondisabled peers do without thinking. Two failures the field lacked language for: the gap between disabled and nondisabled access, and the gap between receiving an accommodation and actually being able to use it.