People with disabilities often experience physical and social accessibility barriers in the workplace, which make it more challenging for them to secure and retain employment over time.  In many cases, these barriers can result from challenges in effectively communicating access needs.  Employers and other workplace decision-makers may lack the knowledge necessary to identify and resolve accessibility issues, and people with disabilities may have concerns about stigma or other factors which leave them reluctant to disclose the specifics of their needs. The goal of this work was to explore key gaps in the ways stakeholders exchange knowledge about access barriers and to identify and evaluate techniques for building mutual expertise around accessibility.

Over the course of this project, we conducted several empirical studies, including 1) interviews and collective access groups with disabled employees and employers (with and without disabilities) to identify existing access barriers for informational exchange; 2) interviews, surveys, and observational data collection about the use of generative AI chatbots by neurodivergent individuals as a strategy to mitigate or prepare to navigate access barriers and knowledge exchange in work and other professional settings; and 3) interviews and design work exploring negotiation of expertise among blind professional artists and their sighted audiences.

Identifying Workplace Access Barriers and Strategies for Knowledge Exchange: Through narrative interviews and collective access group sessions with disabled employees and employers, we identified existing barriers to exchanging information about accessibility in the workplace. Employees had often experienced prior negative experiences with disclosing their disabilities which led them to be more cautious about when in the hiring or employment process they revealed their disabilities to potential employer. They also reported instances where employers’ preconceptions about their disabilities conflicted with their actual accommodation needs.  Employers described the challenges of meeting accessibility requests when navigating other organizational constraints and described multiple strategies for seeking information about appropriate accommodations to implement. Some employers also had disabilities themselves and acknowledged the complexity of combining their own knowledge and experience of disability with the responsibilities of their role in the organization. Through this data, we uncovered opportunities and challenges for technological interventions around the development of mutual expertise in accessibility.

Exploring Neurodivergent Users’ Strategies for Addressing Access Challenges with Generative AI Chatbots: Through interviews, surveys, and content analysis of social media posts, we explored the ways in which neurodivergent individuals use generative AI-based chatbots in work, university, and professional settings.  Specifically, we uncovered patterns of use of chatbots to practice or rehearse conversations that they planned to have with neurotypical individuals. Users relied on the conversational element of these tools to explore strategies for approaching conversations about sensitive subjects, like requests for accommodations or disclosing their disabilities to others. This exploration identified emergent uses of chatbots as a strategic way to rehearse and prepare for knowledge exchange with others.

Designing for Knowledge Exchange between Blind Professional Artists and Sighted Audiences: In interviews and design work with blind professional artists, we explored tensions about technology’s ability to bridge gaps in knowledge exchange around visual information. The blind artists articulated nuanced perspectives about the use of assistive technologies in their work – while in some cases these technologies facilitated blind artists in creating work that sighted audiences could engage with, in other cases the technologies gave them less agency in their creative expression. Generative AI art technologies in particular elicited strong opinions from the artists, who recognized potential uses of these tools for getting early feedback about the visual elements of their work, but also raised concerns about the way the tools might perpetuate sighted norms and stereotypes.

This project resulted opportunities for diverse graduate students to be trained in foundational research skills, including a number of students from groups typically underrepresented in STEM fields. Findings were disseminated through peer-reviewed submissions to conferences and workshops in the field of human-computer interaction. The insights from this work provide a foundation for improving the process of making workplaces more accessible to disabled employees through socio-technical systems.

Last Modified: 12/02/2024
Modified by: Erin L Brady