This qualitative, interpretive study uses a triad of theoretical lenses - affordance theory, hermeneutic phenomenology and the social barriers model of disability - through which to gain an understanding of how people with mobility impairments use digital technologies in their work practices. A hermeneutic phenomenological methodology is used to reveal the phenomena, then to interpret the subsequent text through understandings of accessibility and use-potential which derive from the social barriers model and from affordance theory respectively. The significance of the study for policy, practice and research is a better understanding of how mobility impairment impacts workers who have historically and currently, been and remain, un- and under-employed. Eleven participants, all with mobility impairments, some self-employed and others employed, but all white-collar professionals or management-level ‘knowledge workers’, constitute the purposive sample used in the study. The participants all work in a variety of configurations of ‘flexible work arrangements’. What was found was that the primacy of space, place and the objects and technologies in that space has heightened significance for people with mobility impairments. When confronted with negative affordances which amount to potential or actual barriers to access and participation in workplaces, people consciously set about finding specific, unique and personal solutions in order to participate. What they learn, through metacognitive processes and in response to potential or actual barriers, is how to manipulate negative and non-affordances of space, place and technologies into positive affordances, by doing things differently, by doing things better, or by doing different things, in order to participate in work practices.

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This thesis explores inequality and exclusion of disabled people as customers in the European single market and identifies potential causes of market inaccessibility and opportunities for creating more effective customer policies. The study adapted the concept of the ‘travel chain’ and examined disabled customers’ experience in acquiring customer information, traveling to the shop, navigating retail premises, and interacting in a shop. While the capitalistic nature of and processes in the market prohibit customers from fully exercising customer freedom and choice, for disabled people, customer participation is even more difficult and restrained. Putting forward the experiences of people with impairments gathered through mystery shopping and semi-structured interviews (in Lithuania and the UK) formed the foundation of this research. It was augmented by stakeholders of the European single market for information and communication technology products as well as civil society’s insights gathered through covert observations and semi-structured interviews. This stage of the research investigated the stakeholders’ actual lifeworld regarding disabled customers and market accessibility, power relations among them and access to the formulation of discourse in the public sphere. The presented work has been influenced by the social model of disability, which, combined with Habermas’ theory of communicative action, provided deeper understanding into multiple levels (global, regional and national) of the social, political and attitudinal factors shaping business, civil society and disabled customers’ experiences and realities. A range of overlapping restrictions emerged within discussions about shopping experience challenging legal construction of disabled people as ‘vulnerable’ consumers because of their impairments. They demonstrate how disabled customers’ exclusion is shaped by ableism, as well as the state and business’ focus on non-disabled citizens and customers. The role played by business and civil society’s notions of and ascribed values to disabled customers and market accessibility has been relatively overlooked in the existing disability literature. As well, there has been a focus on the ‘social dimension’ of this issue within the European Union policy context rather than the single market aspect. This study therefore directly addresses the single market dimension and reveals significant tensions between global, regional and national policy instruments. It has also shown how policy frameworks within which the actors operate and certain business’ practices often create further disabling lifeworld in terms of market accessibility and disabled customer equality, in addition to shaping 5 unequal power relations and eliminating certain actors and disabled customers from accessing the formulation of the discourse in the public sphere. This limits availability of accessible products, links product accessibility features with individuals’ ‘accessibility needs’, creates division between disabled and non-disabled ICT users and customers, forbids stakeholders from creating comprehensive and quality knowledge and additionally prevents knowledge innovation and its implementation. Taken together, this all inhibits the assurance of disabled peoples’ rights established in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. By highlighting these issues, the work here argues that cooperative action is needed to address the problem and raises questions about what types of policy framework the European Union and national governments should introduce in order to encourage the private market to take into account aspects of accessibility for disabled customers.

Being able to use websites is an important aspect of every-day life to most people, including disabled people. However, despite the existence of technical guidelines for accessibility for more than a decade, disabled users still find problems using websites. However, our knowledge of what problems people with disabilities are encountering is quite low. The aim of the work presented in this thesis was to conduct a study that characterises the problems that print-disabled users (blind, partially sighted, dyslexic users) are encountering on the web. This characterisation includes the categorisation of user problems based on how they impact the user. Further, frequency and severity of the main types of problems were analysed to determine what were the most critical problems that are effecting users with print-disabilities. A secondary goal was to investigate the relationship between user-based measures of accessibility and measures related to technical guidelines, especially the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 1.0 and 2.0 from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). This was done to both identify gaps in the current guidelines, as well understanding where technical guidelines are currently not sufficient for addressing user problems. The study involved task-based user evaluations of 16 websites by a panel of 64 users, being 32 blind, 19 partially sighted and 13 dyslexics and manual audits of the conformance of websites to WCAG 1.0 and 2.0. The evaluations with print-disabled users yielded 3,012 instances of user problems. The analysis of these problems yielded the following key results. Navigation problems caused by poor information architecture were critical to all user groups. All print-disabled users struggled with the navigation bars and overall site structure. Blind users mentioned problems with keyboard accessibility, lack of audio description of videos and problems with form labelling often. However, beyond these seemingly low-level perception and execution problems, there were more complex interaction problems such as users not being informed when error feedback was added dynamically to a page in a location distant from the screen reader. For partially sighted users, problems with the presentation of text, images and controls were very critical, especially those related to colour contrast and size. For dyslexic users, problems with language and lack of search features and spelling aids were among the most critical problems. Comparisons between user problems and WCAG 1.0 and WCAG 2.0 did not show any significant relationship between user-based measures of accessibility and most measures based on technical guidelines. The comparisons of user problems to technical guidelines showed that many user problems were not covered by the guidelines, and that some guidelines were not effective to avoid user problems. The conclusions reinforced the importance of involving disabled users in the design and evaluation of websites as a key activity to improve web accessibility, and moving away from the technical conformance approach of web accessibility. Many of the problems are too complex to address from the point of view of a simple checklist. Moreover, when proposals are made for new techniques to address known user problems on websites, they must be tested in advance with a set of users to ensure that the problem is actually being addressed. The current status quo of proposing implementations based on expert opinion, or limited user studies, has not yielded solutions to many of the current problems print-disabled users encounter on the web.

Research showing differences between the driving outcomes of hearing impaired and normally hearing individuals (such as raised road traffic accidents), proposes this has occurred due to two main reasons: (1) that sound present in the driving environment is inaudible for hearing impaired drivers, and (2) that audible sound is disproportionately distracting for the hearing impaired driver. This thesis reports on a series of experiments which investigated the latter of these proposals. A questionnaire study was used to explore driving patterns and experiences of hearing impaired individuals. Empirical studies were also conducted to investigate the effect of hearing loss on driving performance and visual attention, under auditory task conditions. Questionnaire responses suggested that hearing impaired individuals did not perceive hearing loss as problematic for driving performance. However, the self-reported hearing of respondents predicted reports of driving difficulty better than any other independent variable. A laboratory-based study hinted that extra visual task performance decrements as a result of auditory engagement occurred in hearing impaired individuals. Since these findings were in older adults, the influence of factors co-existing with hearing loss (such as cognitive decline) were questioned. These confounds were removed by presenting an auditory task subject to simulated hearing loss in a dual-task driving simulator experiment; allowing for a young, normally hearing sample, and within-subjects design. The resulting data showed no disproportionate effect of hearing loss on driving performance during the concurrent auditory task. Accordingly, distortion to sound arising from hearing loss may not be entirely responsible for the disproportionate effects of auditory distraction in hearing impaired drivers. Other factors, co-existing with hearing loss, appear to act synergistically to cause problems. Future work should investigate further the aspects of hearing loss (and co-existing factors) responsible for changes in driving outcomes, by, for instance, using a group of young hearing impaired participants.

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Issues around parenting and psychological support for parents have increased in prominence in UK public policy and discourse over the last decade. However, there has been minimal focus on parenting with a disability, and specifically scant information on the experiences of what it is like to be a parent with visual impairment. In this investigation, using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), I examined how the experience of becoming a parent impacts nine mothers with visual impairment, aged 32 to 47, living in the UK. The findings highlighted various aspects of the mothers’ experience under four meta-themes: 1) struggles around independence, 2) visibility and the impact of the other’s gaze, 3) “life can sometimes be more complicated” and 4) the changed relationship with time. The discussion raised the possibility of counselling psychologists and psychotherapists moving towards a new integrative model to conceptualise the experience of parenting with a disability. It also highlighted three major areas: (i) the need for increased opportunity, flexibility and access to emotional support services for mothers with visual impairment and their partners, (ii) an emphasis on the use of online social networks to reduce isolation and the risk of depression, and (iii) the mothers’ daily experience of stigmatisation and marginalisation in interaction with the other (including an exposition of how the mothers use humour as a way of dealing with this experience).

Disability is argued to have some relation to gender and culture. However much disability and gender research is based on data collected in the Global North, and little is known about disabled women in the Global South. This thesis therefore sets to explore how disabled women in Malaysia experience their lives. Malaysia is a multi-ethnic and multi-religious country located in the heart of South East Asia. It is now recognised as an upper-middle income country but was previously considered as a lower income country following its independence from Britain in 1957. Although the Malaysian government has developed significant disability provision, policies and legislations since the period of colonialism, disabled people still encounter major barriers in many aspects of their lives. More importantly research involving Malaysian disabled women is very limited and this study seeks to fill the gap.

This thesis examines how the internet is used by disabled people in China and focusses in particular on whether internet use can improve their lives and by extension advance China towards a more inclusive civil society. Framing this work are three key overriding issues. First is the rapidly changing and evolving Chinese society and economy, as the country moves from a highly centralised regime to ‘socialism with Chinese characters’. Second is the near absence of disability and disabled people from this process and third is the expanding internet use by Chinese people. There has been very little research on either disability or disabled people in post-reform China and one of the aims of this thesis was to start to explore and fill the gap. The study attempts to find a contextualised and practical pathway to research disability in China. There are two key elements to the research. First is a broad overview of the use of the internet and the emergence of disability digital communities, using quantitative data from a content analysis of two popular disability forums in China’s cyberspace. This was followed by a series of in-depth interviews with 34 disabled people from across China. The data presented in this qualitative element of the thesis explores the intersection between internet use and economic participation, political engagement and cultural representation of disabled people and disability. The core issues that emerged from the analysis include a discussion on: 1) The internet as a tool for empowerment; 2) The internet as a mechanism for inclusion; 3) The internet as not only a tool but also a sphere; 4) The possibility of establishing a ‘netizenship’, to help access to, improve, or replace the un-developed citizenship in China. Overall, the study concludes that whilst internet use has significantly improved the lives of disabled people, it cannot change their disadvantaged position or promote the social justice of the reforming, digital China. Throughout the research there were concerns on the tensions between western-dominated literature and the specialties of the Chinese context. The thesis critically engages with western theories and methodologies to develop its own specific, contextualised framework. This framework takes account of the multiple dimensions of the disabled experience, the agency of disabled people, and social changes in the context of China’s reform. Only through this, the thesis argues, can disability in China be fully and properly explored.

Background: The existing research on factors which influence carers’ responses to challenging behaviour has focussed on paid staff and has largely ignored the experiences of family carers. The aim of this study was to explore family carers’ interpersonal perceptions and responses to their relatives’ challenging behaviour. Method: Eight familial carers of adults with intellectual disabilities who engaged in frequent aggressive challenging behaviour were recruited. A semi-structured, interview was used to explore participants’ interpersonal perceptions and responses at the time of a recent incident of challenging behaviour. This was supplemented with a modified version of the Attributional Style Questionnaire and other rating scales. Results: Participants’ ratings on the quantitative measures did not match the responses they described experiencing during the interview. Findings from the interview suggest that the majority of participants experienced a range of emotions in response to incidents of challenging behaviour. A minority struggled to recall any emotional responses. Conflicting interpersonal appraisals were made by all participants and appear to have influenced both their emotional and behavioural responses to their relative’s behaviour. Conclusions: It appears that family caregivers’ responses to their relatives’ challenging behaviour were complex and, at times, contradictory. Their immediate emotional and behavioural responses during incidents of CB may have been influenced by their interpersonal perceptions made at the time of the incident and their underlying compassion for their relative. Implications for services and future research directions are discussed.