Minor Resistance: The Everyday Politics and Power Dynamics of Assistive Technology Adoption

In accessibility research, the choice to adopt or abandon assistive technologies (AT) is often treated as a stable proxy for functional fit: to adopt is to confirm a good fit between device features and individual needs, and to abandon is to signal poor fit. While useful for design, we argue that the framework is ill-equipped to account for the sociopolitical forces that shape AT use in historically underserved communities. In this paper, we propose a power-aware framework that recasts adoption not as a transparent expression of fit, but as situated negotiation of power. Drawing from an eight-month ethnographic study at a local nonprofit, we examine how low-income, racially-diverse, and disabled families navigate institutional cultures that reinforce normative expectations around disability and AT use. Building on postcolonial theories of power, we introduce the concept of minor resistance to describe the subtle, everyday tactics through which individuals lower the cost of access on their own terms. We argue that this shift in analytical lens reframes the goal of accessibility design from optimizing use to lowering the cost of choice. We conclude with implications for how designers can support community-driven responses to structural barriers by centering self-determination.