>> Dreaming Disability Justice in HCI Workshop

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(Workshop description) In this one-day workshop, we will bring together people doing research to address ableism that takes a justice-oriented and intersectional perspective. We will use this workshop to enrich critical HCI scholarship and challenge western, white, and ableist hegemonies within the field and beyond. This workshop will also be used as a means to go beyond accessibility, acknowledging how disability is present in all facets of HCI, and calling in a diverse range of scholarships to critically reflect on disability justice within their work. Together, we will explore several critical questions, including: How does disability intersect with other overlapping systems of oppression (racism, anti-Blackness, sexism, classism, colonialism, etc) and how does it inform the technologies we design? How does disability justice expand and complicate human-centered approaches in HCI research? What might disability justice look like in HCI? How can we as HCI researchers create and maintain a practice of care in creating access?

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My accepted submission to the workshop:

Behind every paywall that my fingers can gracefully jump, there is always an accessibility challenge waiting for me. I have the privilege to get to your academic articles, and they sometimes read as deliciously as a cold mango on a hot day. Not everyone is granted access to your articles, but I often am or fight for it; otherwise, I wouldn’t be here right now. I can get to the articles, but then I get stuck in the mud.

I have been daydreaming of a button. This button would allow me to listen to academic articles more comfortably. I climbed through the web and over the wall; now, let me eat my mango in peace as the sweet juice drips off my lips. My text reader reads your complete email addresses out. My text reader reads the ACM reference formats, the Copywrites, the tables, and all of the page numbers out. My text reader also skips the information that hides between brackets in your articles. How much have I missed? Why do I need to engage with your work this way? Please send me a plain text file of your work. Or send me a voice memo on WhatsApp. It can be more than 5 minutes, I will listen to it all. Call me and tell me about it, and let me hear the sounds from your street.

Let’s think about how we perpetuate colonial aesthetics of visual knowledge production and validation. Let’s think about why we need to create unreachable articles in these formats that preach accessibility. Let us come together to create a button that takes in these academic articles and converts the document into a plain text file so I can listen to it. I am daydreaming of this button. What button are you daydreaming of?