Stacy Hsueh, Danielle Van Dusen, Anat Caspi, and Jennifer Mankoff. 2025. Minor Resistance: The Everyday Politics and Power Dynamics of Assistive Technology Adoption. In Proceedings of the 27th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS ’25), October 26-29, 2025, Denver, CO, USA.

In accessibility research, the choice to adopt or abandon assistive technologies (AT) is often taken as a proxy for functional fit: to adopt is to confirm a good fit between device features and individual needs, whereas to abandon is to signal poor fit. While useful for orienting design, we argue that this 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 casts adoption not as transparent expression of fit, but as situated negotiation of power. Drawing from an eight- month ethnographic study at a Seattle-based nonprofit, we examine how low-income, racially diverse, and disabled families navigate institutional practices that impose normative expectations around disability and AT use. We introduce the concept of minor resistance to describe the everyday ways people exercise agency in response to power dynamics that make access costly. We argue that this shift in analytical lens reframes the goal of accessibility from optimizing use to lowering the cost of choice. We conclude with implications for how designers can support community-engaged responses to structural barriers by centering self-determination.