Blindness and epistemic injustice: a critical autoethnography of digital disablement in Thailand

Abstract

Thailand’s digital transformation is presented as a route to inclusion, yet everyday accessibility remains unresolved for many disabled people. Combining policy document analysis with critical autoethnography, grounded in emancipatory disability research and analysed through a narrative approach, this article examines nearly thirty years of my experience as a blind person navigating education, public administration, banking, telecommunications, digital platforms, and generative AI in Thailand. Four interlocking patterns emerge: inaccessible documents and interfaces, conditional banking and biometric access, dependence on everyday platforms, and generative AI as compensatory access and epistemic risk. I develop the cycle of digital disablement to explain how these patterns persist despite formal accessibility commitments. The cycle is reproduced through three mutually reinforcing mechanisms: socio-epistemic exclusion, which limits the institutional force of disabled people’s knowledge of inaccessibility; techno-epistemic ableism, which embeds normative assumptions about bodies, perception, competence, and verification in technical systems; and socio-techonomic disadvantage, a term combining the technological and the economic, which transfers the financial, temporal, cognitive, relational, and privacy costs of accessibility failure to disabled users. Policy documents reveal that formal rights are diluted through regulatory silence, voluntary standards, weak enforcement, institutional discretion, and competing priorities. The analysis also shows workarounds widening immediate access while concealing the inaccessible arrangements that necessitated them. The article contributes an integrated account of digital exclusion as an epistemic, technical, material, and regulatory condition. Digital justice therefore requires enforceable accessibility duties, non-visual authentication, accessible materials and interfaces, accountable AI governance, effective remedies, and disabled people’s authority in design, regulation, and evaluation.