Inclusion and assistive technologies in disability rights legislation: a cross-country NLP-based comparative analysis

Abstract

Abstract This study analyzes and compares the thematic structures of two landmark disability rights laws: the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the Lei Brasileira de Inclusão da Pessoa com Deficiência (Brazilian Law of Inclusion, BLI; Law No. 13.146/2015), to explore how they address inclusion and assistive technology (AT) within distinct legal and sociocultural contexts. These laws were selected as major milestones in disability rights, with the ADA influencing subsequent international disability rights frameworks, including the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), whereas the BLI was enacted to incorporate CRPD principles into Brazilian legislation. Using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, including topic modeling, word co-occurrence networks, and Jaccard similarity, the analysis revealed that both laws emphasize the rights of persons with disabilities and reinforce the principle of accessibility. However, notable differences emerged: the BLI adopts a socially oriented, human rights-based perspective, with greater thematic emphasis on AT (2.41% of terms), whereas the ADA reflects a legalistic, compliance-driven framework focused on transportation and anti-discrimination (1.18% AT-related terms). Lexical similarity between the two corpora was limited (Jaccard index of 0.10 for topics and 0.30 for the full corpora), indicating distinct conceptual orientations. These findings highlight the thematic differences between the two legal frameworks and demonstrate that NLP-based analysis can effectively reveal conceptual patterns relevant to comparative disability legislation.