Disability, Differences, and Diversity: Revisiting Inclusive Design and Access
Himanshu Verma, Giulia Barbareschi, Sophia Ppali, Kathrin Gerling, Maartje De Meulder, Judith Good, Jatinder Singh, Katta Spiel, Abdallah El Ali, Marios Constantinides, Maristella Matera, Monica Perusquia-Hernandez, Hamed Alavi, Pablo Cesar, Alessandro Bozzon · 2026 · Extended Abstracts of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '26) — Meetup · doi:10.1145/3772363.3778798
Summary
This 2026 CHI EA meetup position paper — authored by 15 researchers across eleven European and Asian institutions — frames the current moment in accessibility as a policy-compliance inflection point and invites the HCI community to resist a compliance-only reading of the European Accessibility Act (EAA), the US Online Accessibility Act, India's Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, Japan's communication accessibility legislation, and the Accessible Canada Act. The meetup opens with the disconnection between scale (over 1.3 billion people with significant long-term disabilities; 94.8% of top one-million web pages fail WCAG per the 2025 WebAIM Million) and policy enforcement (which remains inconsistent, with Japan's compliance voluntary and EAA implementation due by 2030 despite many organisations reportedly unprepared). The organisers structure the 90-minute session around four themes, each framed by existing scholarship, current challenges, and open questions. (1) Rethinking Inclusive Methodologies: disabled stakeholders are still positioned as testers rather than co-designers, and participation can itself misrepresent disabled experiences through normative, ableist biases. The paper cites the disability-justice principle of 'leadership of the most affected' as a target. (2) Disentangling Technological Challenges: accessible technologies remain siloed, AI systems embody ableist assumptions, and validated metrics for inclusivity beyond usability are absent. (3) Unpacking Ethical Implications: compliance often manifests as 'checklist conformism' rather than holistic consideration, and broader ethical and responsible-AI frameworks currently lack disability representation. (4) Navigating Policy Implications: legislation risks becoming symbolic without accountability mechanisms. The meetup format is an interactive, discussion-driven activity with two parallel stations — a 'Map of Practices' linking topics, patterns, and cross-cutting opportunities, and a 'Map of People' identifying collaborators.
Key findings
As a meetup proposal rather than an empirical paper, the contribution is programmatic rather than evidential. Three threads are worth highlighting. First, the authors argue that the current policy moment (EAA June 2025 applicability, Online Accessibility Act proposed in the US 117th Congress, Canada's ACA 2030 timeline) creates both opportunity and risk: pressure to ship compliance fixes quickly incentivises 'checklist' remediation and displaces the slower, more expensive work of genuine co-design with disabled people. Second, they explicitly name a maturity gap in accessibility evaluation: we have validated instruments for usability (SUS, NASA-TLX, UEQ) but not for inclusivity, which means tools that are highly usable can still be deeply exclusionary without that showing up in standard evaluations. Third, the meetup takes an unusually strong position on the politics of research methods, calling for researcher reflexivity and positionality as integral parts of accessibility-research practice and for scholarship that connects accessibility debates with critical computing, sustainability, and social-justice agendas — rather than keeping accessibility siloed within its own specialist subcommunities. The author team spans inclusive co-design (TACIT project), participatory design with marginalised individuals, Deaf studies, disability rights and policy, affective computing for BLV users, AI-driven multimodal accessibility, responsible AI governance, and immersive-technology design.
Relevance
For practitioners, the most useful takeaway is the framing of the four themes as an actionable audit lens for any organisation preparing for EAA, Section 508, or ACA deadlines: are disabled people genuinely leading decisions; is the technology stack audited for cross-disability and cross-cultural gaps; are the ethics questions being asked beyond the compliance minimum; and are accountability mechanisms in place at the policy level. The paper also names a growing research community (the CHI Accessibility and Aging subcommittee, the Critical Computing / Sustainability / Social Justice subcommittee, ASSETS, and the TACIT EU project) whose outputs are worth tracking for anyone building inclusive AI or XR. The explicit framing of participatory design as itself vulnerable to normative, ableist biases is an important caution against assuming that any workshop with a disabled person counts as inclusive design. Limitations are inherent to the format: this is a four-page meetup proposal with no empirical contribution and the discussion outcomes will not be public until after CHI 2026. The positions should be read as an agenda-setting document for future collaboration rather than validated findings.
Tags: inclusive design · disability justice · accessibility policy · critical computing · ableism · European Accessibility Act · accessibility research · ethics · participatory design · aging · meetup
Standards referenced: European Accessibility Act · WCAG 2 · Accessible Canada Act