Understanding the Role of Socio-Technical Infrastructures on the Organization of Access for the Mixed-Ability Collaborators
Zeynep Şölen Yıldız · 2022 · Proceedings of the 24th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '22) · doi:10.1145/3517428.3550410
Summary
This doctoral consortium paper presents a PhD research agenda investigating how socio-technical infrastructures shape the negotiation and distribution of access for mixed-ability collaborators. Yıldız draws on the Social Model of Disability and Social Justice Oriented Interaction Design as theoretical frameworks, positioning disability not as an individual deficit but as a product of social and environmental barriers. The research examines how access is collaboratively organized, negotiated, and sometimes restricted through both technical systems and institutional practices. The work encompasses multiple case studies spanning different contexts: an examination of online practices within Turkey's autism parent community, an investigation of institutional gatekeeping in higher education access processes, an autoethnographic account of being a disabled design researcher, and an ethnographic study of campus accessibility. A planned final study aims to explore cross-disability solidarity through collaborative communication technologies. Methodologically, the research employs qualitative approaches including ethnography, autoethnography, and community-engaged research, centering the lived experiences of disabled people and their allies. The theoretical contribution lies in articulating how access is not a fixed state but an ongoing collaborative process distributed across people, technologies, and institutions. Yıldız argues that understanding these socio-technical infrastructures is essential for designing more equitable and just collaborative systems.
Key findings
The research reveals several important insights across its case studies. First, access is fundamentally collaborative work — it requires ongoing negotiation between disabled individuals, allies, institutions, and technological systems rather than being a one-time accommodation. Second, institutional gatekeeping plays a significant role in shaping access outcomes, with formal processes in higher education often creating barriers rather than removing them. Third, the autoethnographic study highlights how disabled researchers navigate tensions between their embodied expertise and academic norms that may not accommodate their ways of working. Fourth, the concept of "access work" — the labor involved in securing and maintaining access — is often invisible and unevenly distributed, falling disproportionately on disabled individuals themselves. The planned research on cross-disability solidarity suggests that collaborative communication technologies could help bridge different access needs, fostering collective action rather than siloed accommodations. The socio-technical lens reveals that access failures are rarely purely technical or purely social, but emerge from the interaction between infrastructure, policy, and human practice.
Relevance
This research is highly relevant for accessibility practitioners because it reframes access from a compliance checkbox to an ongoing collaborative process embedded in socio-technical systems. For organizations, it highlights how institutional processes meant to provide accommodations can themselves become barriers through gatekeeping and bureaucratic friction. The concept of access work has practical implications for workplace and educational accessibility — organizations should recognize and reduce the invisible labor disabled people perform to secure access. The cross-disability solidarity perspective encourages designing systems that support collective access needs rather than individual accommodations in isolation. For technology designers, the research underscores the importance of understanding the full socio-technical context in which assistive and collaborative technologies operate, rather than treating accessibility as a purely technical problem.
Tags: socio-technical infrastructure · access work · mixed-ability collaboration · disability justice · social model of disability · gatekeeping · collaborative access · cross-disability solidarity