Ethnomethodology

A sociological approach, founded by Harold Garfinkel, that studies the everyday methods people use to make sense of and produce social order in interaction - the implicit rules and shared practices through which we treat ordinary situations as ordinary. Conversation analysis grew out of ethnomethodology and brings the same close-grained attention to how turns, repairs, silences, and gaze coordinate meaning. In accessibility research, ethnomethodology and conversation analysis are central to AAC scholarship because they let researchers see how AAC-mediated conversations actually unfold moment-by-moment - how partners co-construct meaning, manage timing, and repair misunderstandings - rather than reducing communication to a sender-receiver pipeline. This grounds AAC design in the situated realities of mixed-ability interaction.