The Three Praxes Framework — A Thematic Review and Map of Social Accessibility Research
JiWoong (Joon) Jang, Patrick Carrington, Andrew Begel · 2026 · Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26) · doi:10.1145/3772318.3791125
Summary
This CHI 2026 paper by Jang, Carrington, and Begel (Carnegie Mellon) offers a thematic review and conceptual map of fifteen years of "social accessibility" research in HCI—the body of work, inaugurated by Shinohara and Wobbrock in 2011, that studies how disability is experienced and negotiated in social contexts rather than through purely functional or usability metrics. The authors argue that the field has matured enough to need a reflexive, field-level lens, not just project-level frameworks like Ability-Based Design or Interdependence. Using constructivist grounded theory, they systematically searched ACM and IEEE venues (2011–June 2025), filtered 8,731 papers down to a 605-paper full corpus and a 90-paper theoretically-rich subset, and inductively coded 362 concepts into 46 codes and six thematic territories: Communication as World-Building, Critical Making Practices, Access Ecologies, Methodological Justice, Identity Sovereignty Complex, and Algorithmic Disability Encounters. From this map they derive the Three Praxes Framework: three sites of research practice—Artifact (constructive/"building"), Ecosystem (relational/"relating"), and Epistemology (theoretical/"knowing")—plus two cross-cutting dimensions characterising any work's stance toward change: Temporal Orientation (remedial / adaptive / generative) and Stakeholder Focus (individual / network / societal). They add a reflexive praxis cycle showing how insights should flow bidirectionally between the three praxes. The paper positions itself relative to Research through Design, Critical Technical Practice, Value Sensitive Design, sociomateriality, and Disability Justice, while arguing these lenses do not adequately support field-level analysis.
Key findings
Mapping the corpus revealed that social accessibility research largely operates within a single praxis rather than integrating across them. Artifact work (tool-building, prosthetics, design fiction) often proceeds without theoretical reflection; ecosystem studies (family care networks, platform politics) document barriers without producing artefacts; epistemological critiques (technosolutionism, epistemic violence, masking, phonocentrism) rarely materialise into tools or ecosystem interventions. The authors illustrate specific patterns: ASSETS and CHI differ in praxis emphasis; generative-societal work is rarer than remedial-individual work; "inspiration porn" and ableist assumptions can be reproduced even in well-intentioned building. They surface six core conceptual tensions—e.g., whose communication modes count as legitimate, how access responsibility is distributed, whose knowledge gets centred, whether making challenges or reproduces oppressive systems, and the paradox of relying on algorithmic systems that perpetuate ableist harm. However, they also find "seeds of integration": Baltaxe-Admony et al.'s DREEM project exemplifies a full reflexive cycle across all three praxes over five years; Curtis and Neate's embodied AAC work shows how artifact properties can transform relational ecosystems. Structural barriers to integration include publication venue specialisation, evaluation metrics that reward technical novelty, funding categories, and disciplinary divisions between disability studies and engineering.
Relevance
For accessibility researchers, practitioners, and educators, the Three Praxes Framework offers a practical vocabulary for self-locating one's work ("am I building, relating, or theorising?") and for identifying which complementary praxes to engage. The paper is especially useful as a diagnostic tool for research programmes, PhD committees, and grant reviewers: it exposes missed cross-praxis opportunities (generic tools that ignore lived experience, abstract critiques that never materialise, ethnographies without actionable outcomes). Practitioners designing assistive technologies can use the Temporal Orientation and Stakeholder Focus axes to be explicit about whether their intervention is a remedial patch for an individual or a generative reconfiguration of societal systems. The authors' call for a "reflexive praxis cycle" echoes Disability Justice's emphasis on collective, interdependent knowledge-making. Limitations: the corpus is restricted to ACM/IEEE English-language venues (excluding disability studies, STS, policy, grey literature, and Global South venues), so the map may under-represent community-driven work; the framework is an interpretive lens, not a measurement instrument. Still, it provides HCI accessibility with its most comprehensive field-level map to date.
Tags: social accessibility · disability justice · critical technical practice · research framework · literature review · assistive technology · design theory · social computing · qualitative research · HCI