Envisioning Collective Communication Access: A Theoretically-Grounded Review of Captioning Literature from 2013-2023
Emma J. McDonnell, Leah Findlater · 2024 · Proceedings of the 26th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '24) · doi:10.1145/3663548.3675649
Summary
This paper synthesises thinking from four fields — disability studies, Deaf studies, disability justice, and communication studies — into a framework of collective communication access, then uses it to analyse a decade of HCI captioning research (2013–2023). The authors argue that accessibility research on captioning has overwhelmingly focused on technical improvements to caption accuracy and display while neglecting the social and structural dimensions of communication access. Their framework proposes that genuine communication access requires attention to four interrelated dimensions: (1) what is targeted for change — moving beyond fixing technical infrastructure to also addressing discriminatory social conditions like audism (systemic oppression based on hearing ability); (2) who participates in access — expanding beyond the individual caption user to recognise that all conversation partners share responsibility for communication access; (3) how access is practiced — shifting from access as a static accommodation delivered to a passive recipient toward access as an ongoing, collaborative, relational process; and (4) underlying values — centring disability justice principles of interdependence, collective access, and cross-disability solidarity rather than treating access as an individual problem with individual solutions. The review analysed 132 captioning papers and classified them along these dimensions, providing a detailed picture of where the field currently stands and where it needs to go.
Key findings
The analysis found that the vast majority of captioning research (over 90%) targets change toward technical infrastructure — improving automatic speech recognition accuracy, caption display design, latency reduction, and speaker identification. Only a small fraction addresses the social conditions that make communication inaccessible, such as hearing people's unwillingness to modify their speech, the stigma of requesting captions, or environments where background noise is not managed. Most research positions the d/Deaf or hard of hearing individual as the sole beneficiary and agent of access, rarely engaging hearing conversation partners as co-responsible for making communication work. The paper identifies a promising but small body of work that does align with collective communication access principles — studies that design tools for hearing people to improve their communication behaviours, systems that visualise communication dynamics for all participants, and approaches that position access as a shared conversational practice rather than a technology delivered to one person. The authors draw on Deaf studies concepts including DeafSpace (architectural design principles from Deaf culture), Deaf gain (the unique contributions that Deaf perspectives bring), and audism to argue that captioning research implicitly accepts hearing norms as the default. They also engage disability justice concepts of collective access and interdependence, arguing that access is not something an individual "has" but something a group creates together.
Relevance
This paper is essential reading for anyone working on communication accessibility. Its central argument — that technical improvements to captions are necessary but insufficient, and that real communication access requires changing social conditions and distributing responsibility across all participants — challenges the dominant framing in both industry and academia. For practitioners, the immediate takeaway is that deploying captions alone does not create access; organisations must also address meeting norms, speaker behaviour, environmental design, and the stigma of requesting accommodations. The collective communication access framework is applicable well beyond captioning to any accessibility domain where social dynamics shape whether technical accommodations actually work in practice. The paper also provides a comprehensive bibliography of the captioning field from 2013–2023, making it a valuable reference for researchers. Its limitation is that the framework is primarily analytical rather than prescriptive — it identifies what should change more than how to change it — but the examples of aligned research provide concrete starting points.
Tags: captioning · deaf and hard of hearing · collective access · disability justice · disability studies · communication access · literature review