AT@Work: Intelligent Assistive Technologies for Enabling Workplace Inclusion
Mario Heinz-Jakobs, Sinem Görmez, Hailey L Johnson, Jens Gerken, Max Pascher, Giulia Barbareschi, Saminda Sundeepa Balasuriya, Laurianne Sitbon, Carsten Röcker · 2025 · ASSETS 2025: 27th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility · doi:10.1145/3663547.3748637
Summary
This workshop paper examines the role of digital assistive technologies (ATs) in advancing vocational inclusion for people with disabilities. Despite increasing policy efforts such as the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) and Sustainable Development Goal 8 (decent work for all), people with disabilities remain significantly underrepresented in employment, overrepresented in low-wage and precarious jobs, and often excluded from professional development and training opportunities. The paper identifies the "disability divide" — the sociotechnical disparity between people with and without disabilities in terms of access to, use of, and benefits from digital technologies — as a key barrier. While digitalization has transformed work and education, many digital systems remain inaccessible or insufficiently adaptable, particularly for people with cognitive, communicative, or sensory differences. The workshop brings together researchers, designers, developers, practitioners, and individuals with lived experience to explore key questions: how ATs can be designed for diverse abilities and work contexts, what participatory frameworks ensure meaningful involvement of disabled workers, what role emerging technologies like LLMs, AR, and collaborative robots play, and how long-term impacts on inclusion, autonomy, and skill development can be assessed.
Key findings
The paper highlights three main categories of workplace AT with distinct potentials and challenges. First, digital worker assistance systems support workers with cognitive disabilities in complex manual tasks (assembly, order picking) by providing interactive step-by-step instructions through text, images, video, audio, and spatial hints — but practitioners indicate these need more flexibility to address individual abilities and needs. Second, collaborative robots (cobots) show promise for reducing physical workload and creating inclusive workstations, with studies showing they are well accepted by workers with disabilities, though challenges remain in designing interfaces that adapt to human capabilities while preserving autonomy and competence. Third, sensory aids (screen readers, captioning systems, haptic feedback devices) translate sensory inputs into alternative modalities to support workers with sensory disabilities, but work environments and processes are often not designed for their application. A critical theme throughout is that many ATs are designed without meaningful input from people with disabilities, leading to limited usability, acceptance, and sustainability. The workshop aims to move beyond compensatory notions of AT toward a model emphasizing empowerment, user agency, and sustainable vocational inclusion.
Relevance
This workshop addresses a significant gap at the intersection of assistive technology and employment — an area where technology has enormous potential but also risks reinforcing existing inequalities. For accessibility practitioners, the framing around the disability divide is particularly valuable, highlighting that digitalization itself is not inherently inclusive and requires deliberate design effort. The emphasis on moving beyond short-term usability metrics to assess long-term impacts on autonomy, job satisfaction, and self-efficacy challenges researchers to adopt more meaningful evaluation frameworks. The inclusion of collaborative robotics and AI-enhanced worker assistance systems points to emerging technology frontiers where accessibility considerations must be integrated from the start. The workshop's international organizing team (spanning Germany, USA, Australia, UK, and Japan contexts) and commitment to geographic and disciplinary diversity reflects the global nature of workplace inclusion challenges.
Tags: assistive technology · workplace inclusion · vocational rehabilitation · collaborative robots · cognitive disability · disability divide · digital equity · human-robot interaction · worker assistance systems
Standards referenced: UNCRPD · SDG 8