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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.

COVID-19 Risk Negotation

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During the COVID-19 pandemic, risk negotiation became an important precursor to in-person contact. For young adults, social planning generally occurs through computer-mediated communication. Given the importance of social connectedness for mental health and academic engagement, we sought to understand how young adults plan in-person meetups over computer-mediated communication in the context of the pandemic. We present a qualitative study that explores young adults’ risk negotiation during the COVID-19 pandemic, a period of conflicting public health guidance. Inspired by cultural probe studies, we invited participants to express their preferred precautions for one week as they planned in-person meetups. We interviewed and surveyed participants about their experiences. Through qualitative analysis, we identify strategies for risk negotiation, social complexities that impede risk negotiation, and emotional consequences of risk negotiation. Our findings have implications for AI-mediated support for risk negotiation and assertive communication more generally. We explore tensions between risks and potential benefits of such systems.

Margaret E. Morris, Jennifer Brown, Paula S. Nurius, Savanna Yee, Jennifer Mankoff, Sunny Consolvo:
“I Just Wanted to Triple Check… They were all Vaccinated”: Supporting Risk Negotiation in the Context of COVID-19.ACM Trans. Comput. Hum. Interact. 30(4): 60:1-60:31 (2023)

Race, Disability and Accessibility Technology

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As part of a team of researchers, we have been exploring best practices in incorporating disability justice principles into accessibility research and more generally thinking about how to best incorporate multi-racial, and associated multi-cultural and multi-lingual, perspectives into accessibility work in a deep way. Most of the accessibility research that was published in the past does not mention race, or treats it as a simple label rather than asking how it impacts disability experiences. This eliminates whole areas of need and vital perspectives from the work we do.

This has resulted in two articles. The first, “Working at the Intersection of Race, Disability, and Accessibility” [1] asks how research in accessibility can do a better job of including disabled persons as whole, diverse people, rather than separating disability from a person’s race and ethnicity. In the paper, we present a series of case studies of other researchers’ work exploring positive examples of work that looks more deeply at this intersection and reflect on teaching at the intersection of race, disability, and technology. This paper highlights the value of considering how constructs of race and disability work alongside each other within accessibility research studies, designs of socio-technical systems, and education. Our analysis provides recommendations towards establishing this research direction.

The second, “Race, Disability, and Technology: A Call to Action for Accessibility Researchers” [2] examines what we learned from applying the framework featured in the first. This time, we reflect on our own experience applying the framework and reflect on tensions and considerations that arise while pursuing this work.

[1] Christina N. Harrington, Aashaka Desai, Aaleyah Lewis, Sanika Moharana, Anne Spencer Ross, Jennifer Mankoff: Working at the Intersection of Race, Disability and Accessibility. ASSETS 2023: 26:1-26:18 (pdf)

[2] Aashaka Desai, Aaleyah Lewis, Sanika Moharana, Anne Spencer Ross, Jennifer Mankoff, Christina N. Harrington. Race, Disability, and Technology: A Call to Action for Accessibility Researchers.ACM Trans. Access. Comput. 19(1): 3:1-3:31 (2026) (html)