Accessible America: A History of Disability and Design—Bess Williamson (New York, NY, USA: New York Univ. Press, 2020, 279 pp.)

Abstract

Curb-cuts by the streets, subway elevators, automatic door openers in buses and buildings—Bess Williamson’s Accessible America wonderfully unpacks the sociopolitical histories of designs that are now ubiquitous in the contemporary American society. The conception of the built environment as filled with physical barriers that can be removed through proactive design interventions, as Williamson argues, is a new consciousness emerging in the aftermath of the Second World War when myriad soldiers returned to the United States. Injured and newly disabled veterans’ demand for prostheses and accommodations in the built environment presented the immediacy of the issue to many stakeholders—military hospitals, prosthesis experts and manufacturers, state officials, and disabled veterans themselves.