The Fears, The Hopes, The Oscillations: A Critical Analysis of Tech Startups Targeting Autism
Yihe Wang, Bhavani Seetharaman, Rosemary Steup, Norman Makoto Su, Kathryn E. Ringland · 2025 · ASSETS 2025: 27th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility · doi:10.1145/3663547.3746379
Summary
This paper employs thematic and critical discourse analysis to examine the websites of 38 autism tech startups founded in the U.S. since 2012, investigating how these companies construct problems, users, and technological legitimacy through their marketing language. The autism treatment industry reached $34.1 billion in 2023, and startups are increasingly influential in shaping how autism is represented, addressed, and commodified. The researchers collected textual materials from company websites (headings, captions, blog content) and analyzed them through a four-stage qualitative process: data familiarization, initial coding (producing 333 codes), consensus-based theme development, and iterative refinement with a senior critical disability studies scholar. The corpus spans five service categories: digital therapy and educational technology (47.37%), data tracking (26.32%), assistive technology (15.79%), diagnostic computational tools (5.26%), and community/media (5.26%). A critical finding is the audience-user asymmetry: while autistic children are the most common users of these technologies (n=22), companies overwhelmingly address parents (n=29) as their primary audience, positioning parents as decision-makers and autistic individuals as passive recipients. Most company websites (n=30) reflect a medical model of disability, 15 adopt a social model, and only 5 incorporate elements of an affirmative model. The analysis identifies three interconnected rhetorical patterns that structure startup discourse about autism.
Key findings
The study identifies three key rhetorical patterns. "The Fears" encompasses how startups construct a cultural atmosphere of crisis around autism. Parental fear is evoked through rhetoric that simultaneously praises parents as indispensable while burdening them with moral accountability for their child's outcomes—parents are told they are "a child's best assets" while being warned about missed developmental windows and irreversible consequences of inaction. Professional fear targets clinicians through language of system collapse, workforce shortages, and administrative burden. Cultural fear spans three temporal anxieties: the irrecoverable past ("over ten thousand momentary opportunities" missed), the overwhelmed present ("1 in 4 children" with developmental needs), and the uncertain future ("the cliff" from education to adult services). "The Hopes" reveals how startups promise technological salvation through aspirational rhetoric ("life-changing," "breakthrough," "revolutionary") while reframing care through technical rationality—reducing accessibility to ease of access rather than structural change, redefining engagement as gamification rather than intrinsic motivation, and equating transparency with data surveillance rather than empowerment. Neurotypical behaviors are positioned as desirable outcomes. "The Oscillations" captures how over a quarter of companies (n=10) strategically toggle between medical, social, and affirmative disability models—using neurodiversity language to attract progressive audiences while delivering medical-model products to institutional buyers. This code-switching produces strategic ambiguity where inclusive language masks behaviorist agendas.
Relevance
This paper makes an essential contribution to accessibility studies by shifting critical attention from how technologies function to how they are discursively constructed and marketed. For the accessibility research community, several findings are particularly important. First, the discovery that marketing discourse mirrors problematic patterns in accessibility research itself—techno-solutionism, deficit framing, externally imposed goals—suggests that the field's own conceptual frameworks may be operationalized commercially in ways that undermine disability rights. Second, the strategic oscillation between disability models reveals how inclusive language can be co-opted to make behaviorist approaches more palatable, raising questions about when neurodiversity framing is genuine versus performative. Third, the audience-user asymmetry (targeting parents while autistic individuals are users) highlights how technology development can reinforce paternalistic structures that strip agency from disabled people. For practitioners, the paper urges critical examination of how accessibility technologies are framed: Do they center autistic self-determination, or do they optimize compliance? Do they address structural barriers, or localize problems within the individual? The study is limited to U.S.-based startups, textual analysis only (no visual materials), and does not include autistic users' responses to these marketing narratives.
Tags: autism · disability representation · critical disability studies · marketing discourse · tech startups · medical model · social model · neurodiversity · discourse analysis · ableism