Accessibility in Action

Although accessibility in academic and professional workplaces is a well-known issue, understanding how teams with different abilities communicate and coordinate in technology-rich workspaces is less well understood. When hearing people collaborate around computers, they rely on the ability to simultaneously see and hear as they start a shared document, talk to each other while editing, and gesture towards the screen. This interaction norm breaks down for teams of people with different sensory abilities, such as Deaf and hearing collaborators, who rely on visual communication. Through interviews and observations, we analyze how Deaf-hearing teams collaborate on a variety of naturalistic tasks. Our findings reveal that Deaf-hearing teams create accessibility through their moment-to-moment co-located interaction and emerging team practices over time. We conclude with a discussion of how studying co-located Deaf-hearing interaction extends our understanding of accessibility in mixed-ability teams and provides new insights for groupware systems.