Accessibility in Action: Co-Located Collaboration among Deaf and Hearing Professionals
Abstract
Although accessibility in academic and professional workplaces is a well-known issue, understanding how teams with different abilities communicate and coordinate in technology-rich workspaces is less well understood. When hearing people collaborate around computers, they rely on the ability to simultaneously see and hear as they start a shared document, talk to each other while editing, and gesture towards the screen. This interaction norm breaks down for teams of people with different sensory abilities, such as Deaf and hearing collaborators, who rely on visual communication. Through interviews and observations, we analyze how Deaf-hearing teams collaborate on a variety of naturalistic tasks. Our findings reveal that Deaf-hearing teams create accessibility through their moment-to-moment co-located interaction and emerging team practices over time. We conclude with a discussion of how studying co-located Deaf-hearing interaction extends our understanding of accessibility in mixed-ability teams and provides new insights for groupware systems.
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CSCW research on dyslexia suggests that understanding and supporting the invisible labor of access is a necessary precondition for improving accessibility.
“CSCW research on dyslexia suggests that understanding and supporting the invisible labor of access is a necessary pre-condition for improving accessibility [88].”
From Neurodiversity and the Accessible University: Exploring Organizational Barriers, Access Labor and Opportunities for Change (2024) · cites this paper as [88]
Since current practices do not fully support the multilayered needs of neurodivergent students, they spend considerable time and effort engaging in invisible access labor in order to have their needs met.
“Since current practices do not fully support the multilayered needs of neurodivergent students, they spend considerable time and effort engaging in invisible access labor [11], [88] in order to have their needs met.”
From Neurodiversity and the Accessible University: Exploring Organizational Barriers, Access Labor and Opportunities for Change (2024) · cites this paper as [88]
Access labor is a prominent concept in accessibility and critical access studies, and it conceptually extends CSCW's understanding of articulation work.
“The notion of access labor (or access work) is prominent in accessibility and critical access studies [35], [70], [88] and it conceptually extends core CSCW understandings of articulation work.”
From Neurodiversity and the Accessible University: Exploring Organizational Barriers, Access Labor and Opportunities for Change (2024) · cites this paper as [88]
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Self-citationCripping AI: Reimagining AI Through Lived Disability Experiences
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- Authors
- Wang, E. Q., & Piper, A. M.
- Affiliations
- Northwestern University (US)
- Venue
- Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
- Published
- 2018-11
- Volume
- 2
- Issue
- CSCW
- Pages
- 1-25
- ISSN
- 2573-0142 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2899067352
- Cited by
- 64
- References
- 9
- Citations by year
- 2026: 9 · 2025: 12 · 2024: 6 · 2023: 11 · 2022: 8 · 2021: 10 · 2020: 6 · 2019: 2
- FWCI
- 17.09
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- National Science Foundation
- Northwestern University
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Human Factors and Ergonomics › Digital Accessibility for Disabilities
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Human-Computer Interaction › Usability and User Interface Design
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Hearing Impairment and Communication
- Keywords
- accessibility, co-located interaction, team practice, visual communication, groupware, deaf users
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