Experiencing Access with Interactive Technologies

Introduction

How is access experienced in interaction with modern technologies? Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) has a tradition of asking questions around functionality in the context of assistive and accessible technologies.

Challenges in Current Approaches

However, the additional aspects of lived experiences with disabilities are often secondary to the questions and interests driven by non-disabled researchers. This approach risks producing artefacts that might be functionally accessible but are deemed undesirable, unwanted, or even harmful by disabled communities themselves.

Urgency for Understanding Access

With an increased move towards digitising aspects of our everyday lives, there is an urgent need to understand the fundamentals of how access can be conceptualised, implemented, and flexible to situated engagements.

ACCESSTECH Overview

ACCESSTECH investigates the deeper theories behind access as a component affecting interaction with technologies for disabled people through Participatory Research through Design. Drawing on the PI's outstanding track record in critical analysis and participatory design practices within HCI (including 14 award-winning papers), we approach experiences of access along four paths of inquiry:

1. We identify the needed research and design parameters enabling us to produce knowledge about access-enabling technologies.
2. We establish which methods are required to design and develop critical technologies that are rooted in disability cultures as well as accepted and desired by disabled people.
3. We explore a range of different technologies to understand how they afford different kinds of access experiences.
4. We conceptualise and articulate access experiences as a distinct aspect shaping the interactive characteristics of modern technologies on a theoretical level.

Conclusion

Each of these paths informs disability-centered practices and theories in HCI. Collectively, ACCESSTECH represents a fundamental paradigm shift in the ways we encounter disabilities and technologies.