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• Understanding the Use of a Large Language Model-Powered Guide to Make Virtual Reality Accessible for Blind and Low Vision People

  Jazmin Collins, Sharon Y Lin, Tianqi Liu, Andrea Stevenson Won, Shiri Azenkot · 2026 · Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26)

  Collins and colleagues present the first empirical user study of an AI-powered 'sighted guide' for blind and low-vision (BLV) users in social virtual reality. Social VR platforms like VRChat (40,000 concurrent players) are largely inaccessible: they require interpreting avatars,…

  virtual reality · social VR · blind and low vision · AI guide · large language model

• Co-designing MESA-Bot: Enhancing Accessibility, Privacy, Security, and Trust in a Mental Health Chatbot for Older Adults

  Aishwarya Umeshkumar Surani, Sanchari Das · 2026 · Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26)

  Surani and Das address the gap between accessibility design and privacy-and-security engineering in mental health chatbots for older adults, a population nearly a billion strong worldwide for whom cost, stigma, wait times, and digital-literacy barriers limit access to…

  older adults · mental health · chatbot · co-design · privacy

• Co-Designing Multimodal Systems for Accessible Asynchronous Dance Instruction

  Ujjaini Das, Shreya Kappala, Meng Chen, Mina Huh, Amy Pavel · 2026 · Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26)

  This paper investigates how to design multimodal systems that make asynchronous dance instruction accessible to blind and low vision (BLV) learners. While online exercise videos have proliferated, particularly since COVID-19, dance tutorials rely heavily on visual demonstrations…

  blind and low vision · audio description · haptics · multimodal instruction · co-design

• I-VAMOS: Independent Voting with Accessible Multimodal Offline System for Visually Impaired Users

  Gyeongdeok Kim, Chungman Lim, Gyungmin Jin, Gunhyuk Park · 2026 · Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26)

  This paper introduces I-VAMOS, an offline multimodal voting assistance system designed to enable blind and low-vision (BLV) voters to cast paper ballots independently and secretly. The authors situate their work in the constitutional right to a secret ballot, noting that BLV…

  blind and low vision · voting · optical character recognition · multimodal feedback · auditory feedback

• Imagine, Interact: Eliciting Accessible Interactions from Users with Motor Impairments via Imagined Input Devices

  Radu-Daniel Vatavu, Ovidiu-Ciprian Ungurean · 2026 · Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26)

  This paper reports an end-user gesture elicitation study with eleven participants with upper-body motor impairments - including spinal cord injury, spina bifida, multiple sclerosis, cerebral palsy, Parkinson's, and traumatic brain injury - who were asked to imagine input devices…

  motor impairment · gesture input · end-user elicitation · imagined devices · ability-based design

• Reclaiming VR Design Authority: Deaf Signers Shaping Immersive Classrooms

  Shuxu Huffman, Laura South, Matthew James Buckman, Raja Kushalnagar, Francisco Raul Ortega, Abraham Glasser · 2026 · Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26)

  This paper reports a Deaf-led, ASL-first study of a VR classroom prototype designed to reduce the persistent "visual attention split" that Deaf students experience in remote and online classrooms, where gaze must constantly shuttle between a signing instructor and instructional…

  deaf and hard of hearing · deaf tech · virtual reality · visual attention split · american sign language

• Resilience to Disruption: Accessible Navigation for People with Visual Impairment

  Trevor Cross, Ishani Pandey, Sophia S Jit, Robert Soden, Priyank Chandra · 2026 · Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26)

  This paper investigates how people with visual impairments (PwVI) actually navigate urban environments, especially during severe weather events such as snowstorms, high winds, and icy conditions, and how digital navigation technologies do or do not support those practices. The…

  blind and low vision · navigation · wayfinding · orientation and mobility · crisis informatics

• Access in the Shadow of Ableism: An Autoethnography of a Blind Student's Higher Education Experience in China

  Xinru Tang, Weijun Zhang · 2026 · Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26)

  This paper is a collaborative autoethnography written by Xinru Tang and Weijun Zhang, in which Zhang - a blind graduate student who completed his undergraduate work in a specialized program for blind and low-vision (BLV) students at "University A" in China and later became the…

  blind and low vision · higher education · autoethnography · ableism · disability studies

• Towards Accessible Mobility Support: User-Centered Design of a Passive, Multi-Functional, Low-Cost Knee Exoskeleton

  Yuyu Lin, Yujia Liu, Emma Kim, Alexandra Ion · 2026 · Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26)

  Lin et al. (Carnegie Mellon) propose a fully passive, unpowered knee exoskeleton that aims to sit in the gap between two unsatisfying options currently available to people with mobility impairments: static knee-ankle-foot orthoses (KAFOs), which are cheap and light but lock the…

  exoskeleton · orthosis · knee brace · mobility · rehabilitation

• When Assistive Technologies become Provocations: Unpacking Access in HCI practices using Crip Technoscience, Mouth Interfaces, and XR

  Puneet Jain, Ayush Sharma, Sidharth Chaudhary, Vivek Rawat, Akhilesh Kumar Bhagat, Kratika Jain, Christian Bayerlein, Christopher Lloyd Salter, Gowdham Prabhakar · 2026 · Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26)

  This CHI 2026 paper reframes assistive technology as political provocation rather than technical fix. Developed in long-term collaboration with two disabled artists - Eric Desrosiers (muscular dystrophy) and Christian Bayerlein (spinal muscular atrophy), both mouth-operated…

  crip technoscience · extended reality · XR accessibility · mouth interface · provocation

• Three Modalities, Two Design Probes, One Prototype, and No Vision: Experience-Based Co-Design of a Multi-modal 3D Data Visualization Tool

  Sanchita S. Kamath, Aziz N. Zeidieh, Venkatesh Potluri, Sile O'Modhrain, Kenneth Perry, JooYoung Seo · 2026 · Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26)

  Kamath et al. report an Experience-Based Co-Design (EBCD) process in which five blind or low-vision (BLV) researchers and one sighted collaborator built a web-native, multimodal prototype for exploring 3D surface plots - a class of visualisation central to VUV spectroscopy,…

  blind and low vision · data visualization · 3D visualization · sonification · spatial audio

• Infrastructuring for Access: Co-Designing Writing Tools with a Dyslexic Academic

  Emily Q. Wang, Aron S. Marie · 2026 · Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26)

  Wang and Marie propose Infrastructuring for Access, a design approach that weaves together HCI's infrastructuring theory (Star, Pipek, Ruhleder) with Disability Studies' critique of ableism and with Repair Studies. Unlike Universal Design and Ability-Based Design, which focus on…

  dyslexia · print disability · writing tools · spell checkers · infrastructuring

• "We Figure It Out Together": A Framework for Relational Communication in Disabled and Neurodivergent LGBTQIA+ Romantic Partnerships

  Kirk Andrew Crawford, Foad Hamidi · 2026 · Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26)

  Crawford and Hamidi investigate how disabled and neurodivergent LGBTQIA+ romantic partners collaboratively build and sustain communication practices over time, an area largely overlooked in HCI research that has tended to focus on single points in time or on specific…

  cognitive accessibility · neurodiversity · LGBTQIA+ · disability · intersectionality

• Disability-First AI Dataset Annotation: Co-designing Stuttered Speech Annotation Guidelines with People Who Stutter

  Xinru Tang, Jingjin Li, Shaomei Wu · 2026 · Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26)

  Tang, Li, and Wu present the first study to push the 'disability-first' principle beyond dataset collection and into the dataset annotation stage of the AI pipeline. Their case is stuttered speech: despite a growing number of stuttering datasets (FluencyBank, UCLASS, KSoF,…

  AI dataset annotation · stuttering · speech recognition · disability-first design · embodied knowledge

• "Computer Says No": Disabled Welfare Experiences and Envisioned Futures Under AI Governance

  Humphrey Curtis, Adam D G Jenkins, Alistair Gentry, Sioban Zacharek, Sally McVicker, Timothy Neate, Filip Bircanin · 2026 · Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26)

  Curtis and colleagues investigate how people with aphasia — a language impairment most often caused by stroke that affects reading, writing, speech, and comprehension — experience the increasingly digitised and AI-automated UK welfare state, and how they would redesign it. The…

  AI · artificial intelligence · AI governance · algorithmic decision-making · aphasia

• SceneScout: Towards AI-Driven Access to Street Level Imagery for Blind Users

  Gaurav Jain, Leah Findlater, Cole Gleason · 2026 · Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26)

  Jain, Findlater and Gleason present SceneScout, a prototype web interface that uses a multimodal large language model (GPT-4o) to make street level imagery — the panoramic pedestrian-height photography behind Apple Maps Look Around and Google Street View — directly usable by…

  accessibility · navigation · screen readers · AI · multimodal AI

• Belonging in the Making: Investigating Inclusive Makerspace Design for Youth with Autism

  Krystal Yangmengzi Zhang, Marie Sakowicz, Emily Wingeart, Foad Hamidi · 2026 · Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26)

  Zhang, Sakowicz, Wingeart, and Hamidi investigate how makerspaces — the hands-on, technology-rich learning environments that have become common in libraries, schools, and community centres — can be designed to genuinely include youth with autism, rather than treating…

  technology-rich learning · accessibility · makerspaces · belonging · disability

• From Struggle to Success: Context-Aware Guidance for Screen Reader Users in Computer Use

  Nan Chen, Jing Lu, Zilong Wang, Luna K. Qiu, Siming Chen, Yuqing Yang · 2026 · Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26)

  Chen, Lu, Wang, Qiu, Chen and Yang present AskEase, an NVDA add-on that delivers on-demand, step-by-step, screen-reader-friendly guidance for blind and low-vision computer users tackling unfamiliar desktop software. The work responds to a persistent problem: mainstream tutorials…

  accessibility · screen readers · AI · LLM · assistive technology

• Do-It-Yourself AAC: Co-Designing User-Programmable AI Communication Tools with People with Aphasia

  Jong Ho Lee, Stephanie Valencia · 2026 · Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26)

  Lee and Valencia explore how people with aphasia (PWA) can become designers of their own AI-powered augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) tools rather than users of rigid, pre-built systems. The authors note that aphasia, a language disorder typically resulting from…

  aphasia · AAC · augmentative and alternative communication · end-user programming · generative AI

• Nonvisual Support for Understanding and Reasoning about Data Structures

  Brianna L. Wimer, Ritesh Kanchi, Kaija Frierson, Venkatesh Potluri, Ronald A. Metoyer, Jennifer Mankoff, Miya Natsuhara, Matt X. Wang · 2026 · Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26)

  Wimer, Kanchi, and colleagues present Arboretum, a web-based system that generates accessible representations of introductory data structure diagrams (arrays and binary trees) for blind and visually impaired (BVI) computer science students. The authors argue that current…

  blind and low vision · BVI · screen readers · tactile graphics · data structures

• μCap: Instrumental Music Captions for Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Individuals

  SooYeon Ahn, In-Chang Baek, KyungJoong Kim, Khai N. Truong, Jin-Hyuk Hong · 2026 · Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26)

  Ahn and colleagues introduce μCap (Music Captions), an automatic captioning system that makes instrumental music accessible to Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (DHH) audiences by producing time-aligned, non-lexical textual renderings — syllable-like strings such as 'Tta-da-ding' or…

  deaf and hard of hearing · DHH · captions · closed captions · music accessibility

• Beyond Technical Metrics: Understanding the Gap Between AI Performance and Deaf User Experience in Chinese Natural Sign Language Generation

  Yang Liu, Hui Kang, Yurun He, Jiahui Li · 2026 · Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26)

  This CHI 2026 paper investigates the disconnect between technical performance metrics and actual Deaf user experience in AI-generated Chinese Natural Sign Language (CNSL). The authors argue that existing sign language generation research, dominated by hearing researchers, relies…

  sign language generation · deaf accessibility · AI accessibility · participatory design · human-centered evaluation

• I'm Always a Little Skeptical of It: Verification Practices of Blind Users When Working with Generative AI in Spreadsheets

  Minoli Perera, Swamy Ananthanarayan, Cagatay Goncu, Kim Marriott · 2026 · Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26)

  This CHI 2026 paper reports a remote study with 12 blind screen reader users (11 totally blind, 1 legally blind) examining how they verify outputs produced by Generative AI tools when working on accuracy-critical spreadsheet tasks. Spreadsheets are pervasive in workplace and…

  blindness · screen readers · Generative AI · spreadsheets · AI accessibility

• Not Seeing the Whole Picture: Challenges and Opportunities in Using AI for Co-Making Physical, DIY-AT for People with Visual Impairments

  Ben Kosa, Hsuanling Lee, Jasmine Li, Sanbrita Mondal, Yuhang Zhao, Liang He · 2026 · Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26)

  This CHI 2026 paper explores whether an LLM-based conversational agent can act as a co-making partner — not just a visual aid — when people with visual impairments (PVI) build their own physical assistive technology. The authors extended their prior A11yBits tangible toolkit…

  blindness · low vision · DIY assistive technology · tangible interaction · Generative AI

• As Content and Layout Co-Evolve: TangibleSite for Scaffolding Blind People's Webpage Design through Multimodal Interaction

  Jiasheng Li, Zining Zhang, Zeyu Yan, Matthew Wong, Arnav Mittal, Ge Gao, Huaishu Peng · 2026 · Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26)

  This CHI 2026 paper investigates how blind designers can author webpages end-to-end — generating content and arranging layout iteratively — rather than being limited to either content entry or layout inspection. The authors ran two rounds of co-design with three blind…

  accessible web design · blindness · tangible user interface · multimodal interaction · web authoring