Performing Qualitative Data Analysis as a Blind Researcher: Challenges, Workarounds and Design Recommendations
O. Aishwarya · 2022 · Proceedings of the 24th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '22) · doi:10.1145/3517428.3551356
Summary
This short paper provides a first-person account from a blind early-career researcher about the significant accessibility barriers encountered when trying to perform qualitative data analysis (QDA). The author, based at IIIT Bangalore, situates the work within the broader shift in disability research from studying disabled people as subjects to recognizing them as researchers with agency — a paradigm change supported by the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD). As more people with disabilities enter academia, they encounter tools and workflows designed without their needs in mind. The author tested several popular QDA software packages — Atlas.Ti, MaxQDA, NVivo, and RQDA — and found all had significant accessibility issues when used with a screen reader. Some had completely silent interfaces, others lacked accessible ways to add or view codes, and some relied on entirely visual displays for codes and categories. Turning to mainstream software, the author tried Microsoft Word (highlights invisible to screen readers, comments poorly navigable), Adobe Reader (similar comment navigation issues), Microsoft Excel (workable but cumbersome with many columns), and Markdown with inline footnotes. For audio data, the author developed an unconventional but effective workflow using Audacity to code audio recordings directly by attaching labels to selected audio segments, bypassing transcription entirely.
Key findings
The central finding is that no existing QDA software package is fully accessible to blind and visually impaired researchers — a gap that forces them to develop time-consuming workarounds and spend significantly more effort than sighted colleagues to produce comparable work. The author identified several practical workarounds: using Audacity to code audio data directly with labels rather than transcribing first; using Excel spreadsheets with sort and filter functions for textual data; and using Markdown with inline footnotes for coding, leveraging the fact that Markdown's text-based formatting characters are inherently accessible to screen readers. For visual data (screenshots, videos from social media research), the author must add a preliminary step of converting images and videos into text descriptions before analysis. The paper concludes with specific design requirements for an accessible QDA tool: keyboard shortcuts for assigning codes to text snippets; screen reader announcement of coding status without extra keystrokes; easy navigation between codes (similar to heading navigation on web pages); support for multiple data types (audio, video, text, images); an analysis mode that collapses coded segments by theme with sub-theme support, ideally using a treeview control; and export to spreadsheet formats for further analysis.
Relevance
This paper exposes a critical but rarely discussed barrier to inclusion in academia: the inaccessibility of research tools themselves. While much accessibility research focuses on end-user applications, the tools researchers use to conduct their work are often overlooked. For accessibility practitioners and organizations, this highlights an important principle — accessibility must extend to professional tools, not just consumer products. The author's experience demonstrates how inaccessible software doesn't just inconvenience disabled researchers but fundamentally threatens their ability to participate in academic work on equal terms, reinforcing the very exclusion that participatory and emancipatory research paradigms seek to overcome. The specific design recommendations — keyboard-driven coding, screen reader-announced code status, heading-style code navigation, multimodal data support — offer a concrete blueprint for QDA software developers. The workarounds documented here are also immediately useful for blind researchers currently navigating these challenges, particularly the Audacity-based audio coding workflow.
Tags: blindness · screen readers · qualitative research · research accessibility · academic accessibility · software accessibility · participatory research · disability studies
Standards referenced: UNCRPD