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Mixed Abilities and Varied Experiences: A Group Autoethnography of a Virtual Summer Internship

Authors:

Danielle Bragg,

Josh Urban Davis,

Abraham Glasser,

Joon Sung Park,

Venkatesh PotluriAuthors Info & Claims

Communications of the ACM, Volume 66, Issue 8

Pages 105 - 113

https://doi.org/10.1145/3604622

Published: 25 July 2023 Publication History

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Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic forced many people to convert their daily work lives to a "virtual" format, in which they connected remotely from home. In this new, virtual environment, accessibility barriers changed, in some respects for the better (e.g., more flexibility) and in other aspects, for the worse (e.g., problems including American Sign Language interpreters over video calls). Microsoft Research held its first cohort of all virtual interns in 2020. We, the interns, full-time members, and affiliates of the Ability Team, a Microsoft research team focused on accessibility, report on our experiences navigating the challenges of working remotely. We constituted a variety of abilities, positions, and levels of seniority. Using an autoethnographic method, we provide a nuanced view of how the virtual setting affected the experiences of our mixed-ability team, the strategies we used to improve access, and areas for further improvement. We close by presenting guidelines for future virtual mixed-ability teams to improve workplace accessibility.

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Cited By

Mörike FKiossis I(2024)Workarounds as enabling factor in the use of assistive technology amongst white-collar workers with visual impairmentJournal of Enabling Technologies10.1108/JET-02-2024-0020Online publication date: 28-Aug-2024
https://doi.org/10.1108/JET-02-2024-0020

Index Terms

Mixed Abilities and Varied Experiences: A Group Autoethnography of a Virtual Summer Internship
1. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Computing profession
      1. Assistive technologies
  2. User characteristics
    1. People with disabilities

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cover image Communications of the ACM

Communications of the ACM Volume 66, Issue 8

August 2023

106 pages

ISSN:0001-0782

EISSN:1557-7317

DOI:10.1145/3610954

Editor:
James Larus
Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2023 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 25 July 2023

Published in CACM Volume 66, Issue 8

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Cited By

Mörike FKiossis I(2024)Workarounds as enabling factor in the use of assistive technology amongst white-collar workers with visual impairmentJournal of Enabling Technologies10.1108/JET-02-2024-0020Online publication date: 28-Aug-2024
https://doi.org/10.1108/JET-02-2024-0020

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