The care work of access

CL Bennett, DK Rosner, AS Taylor - … of the 2020 CHI Conference on …, 2020 - dl.acm.org
Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2020dl.acm.org
Current approaches to AI and Assistive Technology (AT) often foreground task completion
over other encounters such as expressions of care. Our paper challenges and complements
such task-completion approaches by attending to the care work of access-the continual
affective and emotional adjustments that people make by noticing and attending to one
another. We explore how this work impacts encounters among people with and without
vision impairments who complete tasks together. We find that bound up in attempts to get …
Current approaches to AI and Assistive Technology (AT) often foreground task completion over other encounters such as expressions of care. Our paper challenges and complements such task-completion approaches by attending to the care work of access-the continual affective and emotional adjustments that people make by noticing and attending to one another. We explore how this work impacts encounters among people with and without vision impairments who complete tasks together. We find that bound up in attempts to get things done are concerns for one another and how well people are doing together. Reading this work through emerging disability studies and feminist STS scholarship, we account for two important forms of work that give rise to access: (1) mundane attunements and (2) non-innocent authorizations. Together these processes work as sensitizing concepts to help HCI scholars account for the ways that intelligent ATs both produce access while sometimes subverting people with disabilities.
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