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”.
In this paper, we examine why promises of empowerment through AT continue to fall short for many underserved populations, even as new innovations emerge every day. We found that low-income, racially diverse, and disabled families usually bear higher costs of access due to bureaucratic red tape that disproportionately affects them. We argue that accessibility research needs a new framework — one that recognizes the sociopolitical realities shaping how families navigate and sustain access. To that end, we introduce the concept of minor resistance to capture the everyday strategies families devise to exercise agency within unequal power dynamics. By focusing on these grassroots practices, we show how technology can be reimagined to help communities build collective power.
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.
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.
Working at the Intersection of Race, Disability, and Accessibility
This paper asks how research in accessibility can do a better job of including all disabled person, rather than separating disability from a person’s race and ethnicity. 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.
We present a series of case studies 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.
This study examines 154,305 Google reviews from across the United States for all medical specialties. Many patients use online physician reviews but we need to understand effects of gender on review content. Reviewer gender was inferred from names.
Reviews were coded for overall patient experience (negative or positive) by collapsing a 5-star scale and for general categories (process, positive/negative soft skills). We estimated binary regression models to examine relationships between physician rating, patient experience themes, physician gender, and reviewer gender.
We found considerable bias against female physicians: Reviews of female physicians were considerably more negative than those of male physicians (OR 1.99; P<.001). Critiques of female physicians more often focused on soft skills such as amicability, disrespect and candor. Negative reviews typically have words such as “rude, arrogant, and condescending”
Reviews written by female patients were also more likely to mention disrespect (OR 1.27, P<.001), but female patients were less likely to report disrespect from female doctors than expected.
Finally, patient experiences with the bureaucratic process also impacted reviews. This includes issues like cost of care. Overall, lower patient satisfaction is correlated with high physician dominance (e.g., poor information sharing or using medical jargon)
Limitations of our work include the lack of definitive (or non-binary) information about gender; and the fact that we do not know about the actual outcomes of treatment for reviewers.
Even so, it seems critical that readers attend to the who the reviewers are when reading online reviews. Review sites may also want to provide information about gender differences, control for gender when presenting composite ratings for physicians, and helping users write less biased reviews. Reviewers should be aware of their own gender biases and assess reviews for this (http://slowe.github.io/genderbias/).
A deeper understanding of how discrimination impacts psychological health and well-being of students would allow us to better protect individuals at risk and support those who encounter discrimination. While the link between discrimination and diminished psychological and physical well-being is well established, existing research largely focuses on chronic discrimination and long-term outcomes. A better understanding of the short-term behavioral correlates of discrimination events could help us to concretely quantify the experience, which in turn could support policy and intervention design. In this paper we specifically examine, for the first time, what behaviors change and in what ways in relation to discrimination. We use actively-reported and passively-measured markers of health and well-being in a sample of 209 first-year college students over the course of two academic quarters. We examine changes in indicators of psychological state in relation to reports of unfair treatment in terms of five categories of behaviors: physical activity, phone usage, social interaction, mobility, and sleep. We find that students who encounter unfair treatment become more physically active, interact more with their phone in the morning, make more calls in the evening, and spend less time in bed on the day of the event. Some of these patterns continue the next day.
Breakdown of 448 reports of unfair treatment by type. National, Orientation, and Learning refer to ancestry or national origin, sexual orientation, and learning disability respectively. See Table 3 for details of all categories. Participants were able to report multiple incidents of unfair treatment, possibly of different types, in each report. As described in the paper, we do not have data on unfair treatment based on race.A heatplot showing compliance with sensor data collection. Sensor data availability for each day of the study is shown in terms of the number of participants whose data is available on a given day. Weeks of the study are marked on the horizontal axis while different sensors appear on the vertical axis. Important calendar dates (e.g., start / end of the quarter and exam periods) are highlighted as are the weeks of daily surveys. The brighter the cells for a sensor the larger the number of people contributing data for that sensor. Event-based sensors (e.g., calls) are not as bright as sensors continuously sampled (e.g., location) as expected. There was a technical issue in the data collection application in the middle of study, visible as a dark vertical line around the beginning of April.Timeline and completion rate of pre, mid, and post questionnaires as well as EMA surveys. Y axis shows the completion rates and is narrowed to the range 50-100%. The completion rate of pre, mid, and post questionnaires are percentages of the original pool of 209 participants, whereas EMA completion rates are based on the 176 participants who completed the study. EMA completion rates are computed as the average completion rate of the surveys administered in a certain week of the study. School-related events (i.e., start and end of quarters as well as exam periods) are marked. Dark blue bars (Daily Survey) show the weeks when participants answered surveys every day, four times a dayPatterns of feature significance from the day before to two days after the discrimination event. The shortest bars represent the highest significance values (e.g., depressed and frustrated on day 0; depressed on day 1; morning screen use on day 2). There are no significant differences the day before. Most short-term relationships exist on the day of the event, a few appear on the next day (day 1). On the third day one significant difference, repeated, from the first day is observed.
Jasper Tran O’Leary, Sara Zewde, Jennifer Mankoff , Daniela K. Rosner
CHI 2019
This paper draws on a collaborative project called the Africatown Activation to examine the role design practices play in contributing to (or conspiring against) the flourishing of the Black community in Seattle, Washington. Specifically, we describe the efforts of a community group called Africatown to design and build an installation that counters decades of disinvestment and ongoing displacement in the historically Black Central Area neighborhood. Our analysis suggests that despite efforts to include community, conventional design practices may perpetuate forms of institutional racism: enabling activities of community engagement that may further legitimate racialized forms of displacement. We discuss how focusing on amplifying the legacies of imagination already at work may help us move beyond a simple reading of design as the solution to systemic forms of oppression.
Academic success and promotion are heavily influenced by publication record. In many fields, including computer science, multi-author papers are the norm. Evidence from other fields shows that norms for ordering author names can influence the assignment of credit. We interviewed 38 students and faculty in human- computer interaction (HCI) and machine learning (ML) at two institutions to determine factors related to assignment of author order in collaborative publication in the field of computer science. We found that women were concerned with author order earlier in the process:
Our female interviews reported raising author order in discussion earlier in the process than men.
Interview outcomes informed metrics for our bibliometric analysis of gender and collaboration in papers published between 1996 and 2016 in three top HCI and ML conferences. We found expected results overall — being the most junior author increased the likelihood of first authorship, while being the most senior author increased the likelihood of last authorship. However, these effects disappeared or even reversed for women authors:
Comparison of regression weights for author rank (blue) with author rank crossed with gender (orange). Regression was predicting author position (first, middle, last)
Based on our findings, we make recommendations for assignment of credit in multi-author papers and interpretation of author order, particularly with respect to how these factors affect women.
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