Beyond Accessibility: Understanding the Ease of Use and Impacts of Digital Collaboration Tools for Blind and Low Vision Workers
Taslima Akter, Aparajita S Marathe, Darren Gergle, Anne Marie Piper · 2025 · ASSETS '25: Proceedings of the 27th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility · doi:10.1145/3663547.3746332
Summary
This paper presents results from a large-scale online survey of 155 blind and low vision (BLV) screen reader users, evaluating the ease of use of 30 widely used digital collaboration tools across five categories: videoconferencing, asynchronous messaging, collaborative writing, project management, and digital whiteboarding. While prior research has explored accessibility issues with specific tools through small interview studies, this work provides the first comprehensive, cross-tool benchmarking of how BLV professionals experience the collaborative technology ecosystem that modern work demands. Participants were recruited through the National Federation of the Blind and American Foundation for the Blind, represented diverse industries (nonprofit, education, healthcare, IT, government), and roughly 80% were employed. The study goes beyond documenting accessibility barriers to examining the downstream impacts of inaccessible collaboration tools on collaboration quality, job performance, and career prospects. The survey used 10-point Likert scales for ease of use ratings and included both quantitative comparisons across tools and qualitative open-ended responses providing rich context about lived experiences with these technologies.
Key findings
Videoconferencing tools were the most frequently used (98% of participants) and easiest to use (M=6.51/10), with Zoom rated significantly easier than all others (M=8.1). Project management tools (M=3.41) and digital whiteboarding tools (M=3.33) were rated as extremely difficult, with many participants describing them as fundamentally inaccessible for screen reader users. Slack was rated significantly easier than Microsoft Teams for asynchronous messaging. For collaborative writing, Google Docs and Microsoft Word Online 365 were comparable but both presented challenges with synchronous editing and comment navigation. Critically, over half of participants reported that technology-related accessibility barriers negatively affected their ability to collaborate with colleagues (52.3%), their job performance (62.6%), and their future career prospects (52.9%). Participants described needing 2-5x longer than sighted peers to complete the same tasks, being excluded from team activities, feeling unable to pursue promotions due to inaccessible tools at higher responsibility levels, and in severe cases being pushed out of the workforce. The findings highlight a key distinction between technical accessibility compliance and actual ease of use — tools that meet WCAG standards may still be extremely difficult for screen reader users to use effectively in practice.
Relevance
This paper is essential reading for organizations serious about workplace inclusion for employees with disabilities. The findings expose a systemic problem: the constellation of collaboration tools modern work requires creates compounding accessibility barriers that affect not just daily productivity but long-term career trajectories. The distinction between compliance-level accessibility and genuine ease of use is particularly important — many tools technically meet accessibility standards yet remain impractical for screen reader users, especially for complex tasks like real-time collaboration, project tracking, and whiteboarding. The career impact data is striking, with participants describing being denied promotions, reassigned jobs, or terminated due to inability to use required tools. For practitioners, the tool-level benchmarking data provides actionable guidance for organizational technology procurement decisions, while the identified barriers (Table 7) offer a roadmap for developers of collaboration platforms seeking to improve screen reader usability beyond basic compliance.
Tags: blind and low vision · workplace accessibility · collaboration tools · screen readers · employment · usability
Standards referenced: WCAG · Section 508 · ADA