Mixed Abilities and Varied Experiences: a group autoethnography of a virtual summer internship
Kelly Mack, Maitraye Das, Dhruv Jain, Danielle Bragg, John Tang, Andrew Begel, Erin Beneteau, Josh Urban Davis, Abraham Glasser, Joon Sung Park, Venkatesh Potluri · 2021 · Proceedings of the 23rd International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS) · doi:10.1145/3441852.3471199
Summary
This paper presents a group autoethnography of Microsoft Research's Ability Team during the summer 2020 virtual internship — the company's first all-remote intern cohort. Eleven team members (6 authors, 5 meta-authors) journaled their experiences over three to four months, documenting the accessibility dynamics of a mixed-ability team that included members who were blind, Deaf, hard of hearing, had ADHD, had chronic illness causing motion sickness, and were non-disabled. The team included full-time researchers and interns at various career stages, creating intersecting dynamics of disability, seniority, and power. Five meta-authors analyzed the fieldnotes and retrospective accounts using open, axial, and selective coding to identify themes. The study uniquely examines a team where multiple different disabilities and accommodation needs coexisted simultaneously in a virtual setting, revealing how accommodations that help one person can conflict with another's needs and how the virtual format both created new accessibility opportunities and introduced novel barriers that had no precedent in in-person work.
Key findings
Five interconnected themes emerged. First, virtual (in)accessibility: video conferencing offered benefits like persistent text chat and multiple communication modalities, but created serious challenges — screen sharing reduced video tile space making ASL interpreters invisible, captioning delays caused conversation threading problems, and a hard-of-hearing member could not be alerted he was on mute because sharing his screen blocked others' video tiles. Second, power dynamics significantly affected accommodation adherence: interns felt uncomfortable correcting senior researchers who forgot norms like announcing their name before speaking, and accommodations were followed less strictly when disabled team members were absent. Third, the team struggled to remember the growing list of accommodations, with adherence deteriorating over the summer. Fourth, accommodations conflicted: interpreters needed video visibility while screen sharing reduced it; text chat enabled access but split attention for caption users and screen reader users. Fifth, allyship was crucial but complicated by virtual invisibility — allies could not see when someone was physically ill from motion sickness or overwhelmed, and back-channeling via chat became a key virtual allyship mechanism.
Relevance
This paper is essential reading for anyone managing remote or hybrid teams that include people with disabilities. Its core insight — that accessibility in mixed-ability groups is not a checklist but an ongoing, dynamic negotiation — challenges the common approach of treating accommodations as static, individual solutions. The concept of access labor (the hidden, unacknowledged work disabled people do to create access for themselves) is made vividly concrete through examples like Jain needing to join two separate video calls simultaneously to access captions while presenting. The practical guidelines are immediately actionable: establish norms collectively rather than by individual request, organize accommodations by context (e.g., "presentation norms" vs. "conversation norms") rather than by disability, schedule regular norm reviews as team membership changes, and frame norm violations as "reminders" rather than "calling out." The study is limited to one team at one organization during a unique pandemic period, and participants self-selected to share their experiences.
Tags: remote work · mixed-ability teams · autoethnography · virtual collaboration · workplace accessibility · access labor · allyship · invisible disability · accommodation · video conferencing
Standards referenced: Americans with Disabilities Act