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Capstone Course: Accessibility and Race

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Disabled people live at the intersection of multiple identities that shape their access needs and technology experiences. Designing equitable systems requires preparing future technologists to critically engage with how technologies interact with systems of oppression. We approached a quarter-long capstone course with one central question: Do the processes and expectations of engineering education (in the context of an accessibility capstone) adequately incorporate multiple intersectional perspectives? By using this as a guiding pedagogical framework, we uncovered gaps in standard processes and requirements and developed practical solutions for addressing them. We outline the theoretical foundations informing the course, its structure and implementation, and reflect on the tensions that emerged throughout the course. We offer considerations for educators seeking to meaningfully integrate intersectional accessibility into computing education.

Aaleyah Lewis, Stacy Hsueh, Jennifer Mankoff Integrating Intersectional Frameworks Into an Accessibility Capstone.RESPECT 2026: 244-254 (html)

“I Don’t Trust it, but I Use it”: Navigating Trust, Privacy, and Identity in Disabled People’s Use of Generative AI

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Jazette Johnson, Aaleyah Lewis, Jennifer Mankoff, and Olivia Banner. 2026. “I Don’t Trust it, but I Use it”: Navigating Trust, Privacy, and Identity in Disabled People’s Use of Generative AI. In Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’26), April 13–17

As generative AI (GenAI) is integrated into everyday technologies, it offers new accessibility opportunities and risks for disabled people. However, little is known about how disabled people navigate GenAI in their everyday lives, particularly how trust, privacy, and intersectional identities affect these experiences. We present findings from seven cross-disability focus groups (N=20) that explore how disabled people navigate GenAI. Our findings reveal that while GenAI supports autonomy, efficiency, and communication, it also introduces accessibility taxes and ethical dilemmas. Although participants voiced skepticism, many continued using GenAI out of necessity. Finally, we found identity-based benefits and tensions, in which GenAI preserved and validated intersecting identities, but also misrepresented and erased those identities. We frame these negotiations as a constant balancing act between access and risk, urging research to further examine how “access” is conceptualized. We offer implications for creating GenAI tools that are transparent, trustworthy, and responsive to intersectional identities.

What Do We Mean by “Accessible”

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Lots of people have ideas about what “accessible” means — but they don’t all agree. Maybe we should ask disabled people. We could also learn a lot by asking a wide variety of disabled people, including disabled people who are gender diverse, racially diverse, have multiple disabilities, and have a wide range of disabilities.

We asked 25 disabled people about what accessibility means to them. We learned that it goes beyond typical definitions of addressing an impairment of some kind. We also learned about how people decide what accessibility technologies they want to use. Many people told us that they choose from many possible approaches in each specific situation, weighing all the available options and their priorities in a so-called “consequence calculus”.

Reference: Modeling Accessibility: Characterizing What We Mean by “Accessible” Kelly Avery Mack, Jesse J Martinez, Aaleyah Lewis, Jennifer Mankoff, James Fogarty, Leah Findlater, Heather D. Evans, Cynthia L Bennett, Emma J McDonnell. ASSETS 2025

Autoethnographic Insights from Neurodivergent GAI “Power Users”

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Kate Glazko, JunHyeok Cha, Aaleyah Lewis, Ben Kosa, Brianna Wimer, Andrew Zheng, Yiwei Zheng, and Jennifer Mankoff. 2025. Autoethnographic Insights from Neurodivergent GAI “Power Users”. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’25), April 26-May 1, 2025, Yokohama, Japan. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 20 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/ 3706598.3713670

Generative AI has become ubiquitous in both daily and professional life, with emerging research demonstrating its potential as a tool for accessibility. Neurodivergent people, often left out by existing accessibility technologies, develop their own ways of navigating normative expectations. GAI offers new opportunities for access, but it is important to understand how neurodivergent “power users”—successful early adopters—engage with it and the challenges they face. Further, we must understand how marginalization and intersectional identities influence their interactions with GAI. Our autoethnography, enhanced by privacy-preserving GAI-based diaries and interviews, reveals the intricacies of using GAI to navigate normative environments and expectations. Our findings demonstrate how GAI can both support and complicate tasks like code-switching, emotional regulation, and accessing information. We show that GAI can help neurodivergent users to reclaim their agency in systems that diminish their autonomy and self-determination. However, challenges such as balancing authentic self-expression with societal conformity, alongside other risks, create barriers to realizing GAI’s full potential for accessibility.

Toward Language Justice

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Aashaka Desai, Rahaf Alharbi, Stacy Hsueh, Richard E. Ladner, and Jennifer Mankoff. 2025. Toward Language Justice: Exploring Multilingual Captioning for Accessibility. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’25), April 26–May 01, 2025, Yokohama, Japan. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 18 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713622

A growing body of research investigates how to make captioning experiences more accessible and enjoyable to disabled people. However, prior work has focused largely on English captioning, neglecting the majority of people who are multilingual (i.e., understand or express themselves in more than one language). To address this gap, we conducted semi-structured interviews and diary logs with 13 participants who used multilingual captions for accessibility. Our findings highlight the linguistic and cultural dimensions of captioning, detailing how language features (scripts and orthography) and the inclusion/negation of cultural context shape the accessibility of captions. Despite lack of quality and availability, participants emphasized the importance of multilingual captioning to learn a new language, build community, and preserve cultural heritage. Moving toward a future where all ways of communicating are celebrated, we present ways to orient captioning research to a language justice agenda that decenters English and engages with varied levels of fluency.