Tackling the Lack of a Practical Guide in Disability-Centered Research
Emma J. McDonnell, Kelly Avery Mack, Kathrin Gerling, Katta Spiel, Cynthia L. Bennett, Robin N. Brewer, Rua Mae Williams, Garreth W. Tigwell · 2023 · ASSETS '23: Proceedings of the 25th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility · doi:10.1145/3597638.3615650
Summary
This workshop paper proposes a structured effort to develop a practical guide for conducting disability-centered accessibility research. The authors — a team of eight researchers across multiple institutions, several of whom are disabled scholars — argue that while the HCI and accessibility research communities promote human-centered and participatory design approaches, research processes frequently fail to meaningfully center disabled people or share power with them. The paper identifies several problems: research that produces irrelevant technological artifacts (so-called "disability dongles"), studies that perpetuate harmful stereotypes by prioritizing non-disabled perspectives, and findings that systematically harm the communities they claim to support. The workshop is structured in three phases. A pre-workshop phase uses asynchronous communication on platforms like Discord to build community and gather anonymous questions. The main workshop consists of two two-hour synchronous sessions held on separate days via Zoom, with breakout rooms for small group discussion. Activities address four core topics: exploring researcher positionality and biases, developing research questions that share power with disabled communities, choosing accessible research methodologies, and appropriately reporting findings. The post-workshop phase aims to refine the discussions into a community resource. The organizers draw on frameworks including disability justice, critical disability studies, the Counterventional Principles, and the PEACE framework for participatory evaluation to guide discussions.
Key findings
The paper identifies several critical gaps in current accessibility research practice. First, despite growing calls to adopt disability justice as a framework, there is insufficient practical guidance on how to operationalize these principles in day-to-day research. Second, emerging scholarship on participatory reform in HCI remains marginalized within the discipline, partly due to the intersectional identities and junior status of the writers producing it. Third, even well-intentioned community resources like the SIGACCESS Accessible Writing Guides have contained instances where harmful language went unchallenged, perpetuating problematic power dynamics. The workshop design itself models disability-centered practices: it combines synchronous and asynchronous participation to accommodate different access needs, accounts for power dynamics when forming groups (e.g., PhD students vs. tenured faculty), offers sign language translation and captioning, accepts multiple submission formats including video and graphical formats to reduce barriers associated with academic publishing, and solicits experience reports from disabled people about research participation — including instances where participation was declined. The call for papers explicitly invites people new to accessibility research alongside established researchers, and reaches out to communities currently underrepresented in accessibility research.
Relevance
This workshop addresses a fundamental tension in accessibility research: the field studies disability but has not adequately examined its own practices through a disability justice lens. For accessibility practitioners and researchers, the paper serves as both a call to action and a practical starting point for self-reflection. The four workshop topics — positionality, research question formulation, methodology design, and findings reporting — map directly onto stages where power imbalances can be identified and addressed. The emphasis on researcher positionality is particularly important: questions like "How do you describe your research participants?" and "Did you talk to participants before research questions were decided?" offer concrete entry points for critically examining one's own work. The workshop's commitment to producing an ongoing community resource, potentially submitted to TACCESS or developed into a course for larger conferences like CHI, suggests lasting impact beyond a single event. For organizations conducting user research with disabled people, the principles discussed here — sharing power, ensuring accessible research processes, and enabling communities to critically appraise findings — are directly applicable to industry practice.
Tags: disability justice · research methods · participatory design · power dynamics · disability studies · research ethics · positionality