Paper short abstract:

Accessible and adapted digital technologies configure a new environment for students with disabilities. This presentation therefore focuses on multiple and complex adjustments at work in a particular infrastructure of care.

Paper long abstract:

This research shows how "care" plays an important role within new technologies design for students with disabilities. It underlines a new way of constructing knowledge about disability and special needs into education through the association of researchers, caregivers and people with disabilities during an experimental process.

The empirical part is based on qualitative data collected through ethnographical fieldwork including participant observation within schools or specialized institutions and semi-structured interviews with caregivers and students with disabilities. A discourse analysis is also made. It incorporates the virtual space of forums talking about school for children with disabilities. Threads about the use of digital technologies and their possible influence on the future of this category of students are taken into account.

Findings demonstrate that the experimental process provides the infrastructure (Jensen, Morita, 2015) allowing digital artifacts and people to meet. Furthermore, the way in which adapted technologies are made participate to the "configuration" of the user (Woolgar, 1991) by including mainstream or specialized affordances (Gibson, 1977). In the same time, the relationship between the object and the user gains in being understood as a complex adjustment process (Winance, 2010). Care then appears as a reciprocal movement. On one hand, caregivers and families engage into "improving the future" of students with disabilities by guiding them during the learning of adapted or accessible technologies. On the other hand, young people with disabilities tend to adopt these new artifacts in order to become autonomous and therefore facilitate the others' efforts and intervention over time.