Cripping Data Visualizations: Crip Technoscience as a Critical Lens for Designing Digital Access
Stacy Hsueh, Beatrice Vincenzi, Akshata Murdeshwar, Marianela Ciolfi Felice · 2023 · ASSETS 2023: The 25th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility · doi:10.1145/3597638.3608427
Summary
This paper applies crip technoscience as a critical, generative framework for rethinking how accessible data visualizations are designed. The authors argue that current approaches to visualization accessibility largely treat access as a technical problem to be solved by specialists, positioning blind and low vision people as passive recipients rather than creative agents. Drawing on crip wisdom from disability studies, crip theory, and design scholarship, the paper identifies four qualities of access that challenge mainstream assumptions: access as an ongoing process rather than a static requirement to fill, access as a frictional practice rather than passive compliance, access as an aesthetic experience rather than a purely functional issue, and access as transformation rather than retrofitting. Each quality is grounded in specific disabled practices and critical texts, from the mutual aid networks described by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha to the curb-cutting activism of wheelchair users in the 1970s. The authors then apply these four lenses to accessible data visualization through speculative design case studies developed through an iterative research-through-design process involving brainstorming, scenario building, material explorations, and prototyping. The methodology is explicitly interpretive and critical, informed by the first author's immersion in critical disability studies literature and the team's positionality as intersectional feminists with varying experiences living and working with visually impaired and disabled people.
Key findings
The four speculative design concepts each operationalize a different quality of crip access. The Participatory Screen Reader reimagines alt text as a collective, ongoing negotiation by embedding a community feature into screen reader software where blind and low vision users and their trusted networks collaboratively create, tag, vote on, and browse visualization descriptions. The @HackingAccess concept envisions a traveling collective of disabled data crafters who create tactile physicalizations of inaccessible street data graphics using 3D printing, weaving, and block carving, treating access as frictional activism that raises awareness. Audio Narratives explores the aesthetic dimension of access by translating visualizations into rich sonic experiences, including a sports-commentary-style radio broadcast of a GDP bar chart race and an audio-tactile book combining braille, narration, field recordings, and textile to narrate Minard's visualization of Napoleon's March. The Data Jungle reverses the direction of inclusion by centering blind epistemologies, designing a warehouse-scale interactive installation navigated by white cane where textured floor patches trigger species sounds representing biodiversity data. The paper concludes with three design tactics: cultivating access intimacy through small-scale mutual aid, embracing provisionality as a design quality, and prioritizing existing disabled practices as sites of collective imagination.
Relevance
This paper is significant for accessibility practitioners because it challenges the dominant framing of access as a compliance checklist or engineering problem, instead positioning disabled people's creative practices as generative starting points for design. The four qualities of access provide a practical analytical vocabulary for evaluating whether accessibility efforts are truly centering disabled perspectives or merely retrofitting normative designs. The speculative concepts, while not implemented systems, offer concrete design directions that push beyond standard solutions like auto-generated alt text or simple sonification. For organizations working on data visualization accessibility, the paper's emphasis on community-driven, ongoing, and aesthetically rich access offers a counterpoint to one-size-fits-all automated approaches. The work also highlights the importance of attending to the materiality and form of accessible content, not just its informational accuracy.
Tags: data visualization · crip technoscience · crip theory · blind and low vision · speculative design · critical disability studies · alternative text · tactile graphics · sonification · accessible design
Standards referenced: WCAG · Section 508 · ADA