A Workshop on Disability Inclusive Remote Co-Design
Maryam Bandukda, Giulia Barbareschi, Aneesha Singh, Dhruv Jain, Maitraye Das, Tamanna Motahar, Jason Wiese, Lynn Cockburn, Amit Prakash, David Frohlich, Catherine Holloway · 2022 · Proceedings of the 24th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 22) · doi:10.1145/3517428.3550403
Summary
This workshop paper addresses how the COVID-19 pandemic forced accessibility researchers to adapt co-design methods from in-person to remote formats, and the unique challenges this created for research involving disabled and aging participants. While the shift to online collaboration removed the burden of physical travel to workshop venues, it introduced new barriers: inaccessible online collaboration platforms restricted participants' engagement and contribution, and the burden of adapting to digital tools fell disproportionately on participants who may already face challenges with unfamiliar or inaccessible technology. These problems were compounded for disabled researchers themselves, who faced the same platform accessibility issues while trying to facilitate research. The workshop brought together an international team of eleven researchers from UCL, Keio University, University of Washington, Northwestern, University of Utah, University of Toronto, IIIT Bangalore, and University of Surrey. Drawing on the participatory design tradition and Mankoff et al.'s influential argument for including disabled people in research about them, the organizers created a 3.5-hour virtual event structured around participant presentations, guided breakout discussions on barriers and methods, and collaborative brainstorming on best practices. Discussion scenarios covered working with people with sensory impairments, facilitating co-design as a disabled scholar, working with co-occurring disabilities, children, older adults, and working in the Global South and across cultures.
Key findings
The paper identifies several key tensions in remote co-design with disabled populations. Online co-design offers clear benefits — accessing geographically dispersed or "hard to reach" populations, reducing costs, and eliminating travel barriers — but the inaccessibility of mainstream collaboration platforms (video conferencing, shared whiteboards, document editing) creates new forms of exclusion. Poor internet connectivity, unfamiliarity with digital tools, and platform features that assume particular abilities (visual interfaces, audio-dependent communication) all act as barriers. The paper highlights that traditional co-design already uses multisensory materials — tactile, auditory, and olfactory — to increase accessibility, and that translating these approaches to digital spaces remains a significant unsolved challenge. The spatiotemporal quadrant model proposed by Davis et al., combining synchronous and asynchronous activities across physical and digital spaces, is identified as a promising framework. The workshop aimed to produce an open-source repository of methods, toolkits, and best practices, and establish a Discord-based community of practice for ongoing collaboration.
Relevance
This paper matters for any organization conducting user research, usability testing, or design work that involves disabled participants — which, given that accessibility should be built into all products, means all organizations. The pandemic accelerated remote research practices that are now standard, and the accessibility gaps identified here persist in commonly used platforms like Zoom, Miro, Google Docs, and Figma. Practitioners should consider whether their remote research tools and methods create barriers for disabled participants, and whether they are placing undue burden on participants to adapt to inaccessible platforms. The emphasis on hybrid approaches — combining synchronous and asynchronous, digital and physical activities — provides a practical framework for more inclusive research. The inclusion of Global South perspectives is particularly valuable, as accessibility challenges are amplified by infrastructure limitations in lower-resource contexts.
Tags: co-design · remote research · participatory design · disability inclusion · COVID-19 · accessible platforms · research methods · Global South accessibility