Channelling, Coordinating, Collaborating: A Three-Layer Framework for Disability-Centered Human-Agent Collaboration
This work addresses the need for more collaborative AI tools for people with disabilities, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing frameworks like Ability-Diverse Collaboration and Carlile's 3T.
The paper tackles the problem that AI accessibility tools are often designed for individual use, whereas people with disabilities frequently rely on collaborative efforts with others, by proposing a three-layer framework (Channelling, Coordinating, Co-Creating) to rethink AI's role in ability-diverse collaboration, resulting in a conceptual extension of existing visions without concrete numerical results.
AI accessibility tools have mostly been designed for individual use, helping one person overcome a specific functional barrier. But for many people with disabilities, complex tasks are accomplished through collaboration with others who bring complementary abilities, not solitary effort. We propose a three-layer framework, Channelling, Coordinating, and Co-Creating, that rethinks AI's role in ability-diverse collaboration: establishing shared informational ground across abilities, mediating workflows between collaborators with different abilities, and contributing as a bounded partner toward shared goals. Grounded in the Ability-Diverse Collaboration framework, grounding theory, and Carlile's 3T framework, it extends the ``agents as remote collaborators'' vision by centring the collaborative, interdependent ways people with disabilities already work.