Participant Recruitment in Accessibility Research
Lloyd May, Saad Hassan, Khang Dang, Sooyeon Lee, Oliver Alonzo · 2025 · ASSETS 2025: 27th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility · doi:10.1145/3663547.3748639
Summary
This workshop paper addresses the critical but underexplored challenge of recruiting participants with disabilities for accessibility research. Grounded in the principle "Nothing about us without us," the paper argues that including people with disabilities as research participants is fundamental to accessibility research, yet the recruitment process itself raises significant ethical and methodological tensions. The authors identify several key challenges: recruited participants often do not adequately represent the diversity of disability communities; certain participants become overburdened by repeated recruitment; participant verification is complicated by evolving models of disability (medical, social, identity, cultural, political/relational); online recruiting platforms like Prolific have unknown screening verifiability; and generative AI enables fraudulent responses that align with verification methods. The paper also highlights that accessibility research has historically been biased toward Western and Global North perspectives, and that non-disabled researchers recruiting from disability communities they are not members of raises additional trust concerns. The workshop was structured as three online sessions across multiple days to reduce participant fatigue, covering three themes: (1) methods and models for recruiting from different disability communities, (2) eligibility criteria and participant verification across different disability models, and (3) ethical and sustainability considerations including fair compensation and community burden.
Key findings
The paper identifies several important tensions in current recruitment practices. First, the growing volume of accessibility research places increasing demands on disability communities, with some online communities (e.g., Reddit's r/deaf) implementing outright bans on research recruitment due to community fatigue from unpaid studies. Second, disability models have evolved from medical to social, identity, cultural, and political/relational frameworks, creating tensions around how eligibility criteria are defined and verified — what counts as "disabled enough" varies significantly depending on the model adopted. Third, intersectionality is largely absent from recruitment guidance, despite researchers and activists arguing that disability identities should be understood alongside gender, race, and other social identities. Fourth, the rise of generative AI introduces new risks of fraudulent participants who can produce responses aligned with screening criteria. Fifth, researchers may turn to large language models as participant replacements, risking epistemic injustice by substituting lived experience with synthetic data. The workshop aimed to develop preliminary guidelines addressing these challenges through facilitated discussions with up to 30 accessibility researchers who have experience recruiting participants with disabilities.
Relevance
This paper tackles a foundational methodological concern that affects the validity and ethics of all accessibility research. For practitioners and researchers, the identified tensions — between inclusion and overburdening, between verification and trust, between rigor and accessibility — have no easy solutions but demand conscious engagement. The emphasis on intersectionality in recruitment is particularly important, as accessibility research that fails to account for how disability intersects with race, gender, culture, and geography risks producing findings that primarily reflect the experiences of the most frequently recruited demographic groups. The workshop's commitment to geographic diversity and Global South perspectives challenges the field to broaden its participant base beyond Western populations. The practical considerations around fair compensation, community sustainability, and fraudulent responses provide actionable concerns for any researcher designing an accessibility study. This paper serves as an important call to formalize and share recruitment practices that have traditionally been learned informally.
Tags: research methods · participant recruitment · disability studies · ethics · intersectionality · accessibility research · community engagement · research ethics