Accessibility Research Across Borders: Collaboration and Community Building in Accessibility and ICTD Research
Tamanna Motahar, Vaishnav Kameswaran, Sara Moin, Vikram Kamath Cannanure, Maitraye Das, Giulia Barbareschi, Laura Sanely Gaytán-Lugo, Aditya Vashistha, Kurtis Heimerl, Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed, Neha Kumar, Nova Ahmed, Maya Cakmak · 2025 · ASSETS 2025: 27th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility · doi:10.1145/3663547.3748641
Summary
This workshop paper proposes and describes an ASSETS 2025 workshop exploring collaboration and community building at the intersection of accessibility research and Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD). The organizers — a diverse, international committee of 13 researchers from institutions across the US, India, Germany, Japan, Mexico, Canada, and Bangladesh — argue that a significant gap exists between accessibility research conducted in resource-rich societies and the realities faced by disabled communities in resource-constrained settings. They note that over 80% of the one billion people with disabilities worldwide live in the Global South, yet most published research at HCI venues on disability and technology originates from the Global North. This disconnect means that socio-economic and infrastructural constraints faced by disabled people in low-resource settings are often overlooked, while innovative, sustainable solutions developed in these contexts are not leveraged globally. The workshop aims to bring together early-career and experienced researchers, educators, disability activists, designers, and members of the disabled community to explore how inclusive research practices can inform the development of affordable assistive technologies across borders.
Key findings
The workshop is structured as a four-hour online event with several components: attendee presentations (6 minutes each from position papers), a fireside chat with senior researchers about their experiences in cross-border accessibility and ICTD research, breakout sessions organized around four themes (accessibility capacity building across borders, disability rights in the Global South, global collaboration ethics and community-driven research, and sustainable innovation in HCI4D), and a "Balloon Debate" panel where organizers role-play different stakeholders (reviewers, funding agencies, Global South researchers, senior researchers) to surface sensitive, less-spoken factors in cross-border research collaboration. The workshop accepts alternative submission formats including pictorials, short videos, and posters to reduce barriers to participation, and will be conducted entirely online to eliminate visa and travel constraints. Pre-workshop activities include a Slack channel for community building and shared Google Docs for collaborative note-taking. The organizers emphasize diversity and inclusion considerations including gathering accessibility needs in advance, sharing discussion etiquette guidelines, enabling subtitles, and allowing anonymous question submission. Selected position papers will be published in ACM Interactions Magazine.
Relevance
This workshop addresses a critical structural inequality in accessibility research: the mismatch between where most disabled people live (the Global South) and where most accessibility research is produced and published (the Global North). For accessibility practitioners, the paper raises important questions about whether assistive technology solutions designed in well-resourced contexts are appropriate, affordable, or sustainable in low-resource settings, and conversely, whether innovative local solutions from the Global South could benefit users globally if properly supported and disseminated. The workshop's focus on affordable assistive technologies, local fabrication tools, and community-driven research models provides a framework for thinking about accessibility beyond the Western, high-income context that dominates the field. The emphasis on structural barriers — limited funding, language barriers, procedural challenges, imbalanced power dynamics, and low representation of Global South researchers at premier venues — is essential context for anyone working to make accessibility research truly global and equitable.
Tags: global south · ICTD · community building · collaboration · affordable assistive technology · capacity building · inclusive research · low-resource settings