"If We Had the Information That We Need to Interpret the World Around Us, We Wouldn't Be Disabled:" Barriers and Opportunities in Information Work among Blind and Sighted Colleagues
For HCI researchers and practitioners designing collaborative tools, this paper provides an empirically grounded framework to understand and address barriers faced by blind and low-vision employees in knowledge work.
This paper identifies four types of failures and workarounds in information representation use among mixed-ability teams, highlighting how workplace stigmas and social dynamics shape interdependent information work. The findings are based on a diary study with 23 participants and focus groups with 7 participants.
Despite recognition of the value of diversity, the way work takes place can fail to support blind or low-vision employees, especially in collaborative work settings. This paper examines how professional teams with diverse visual abilities use information representations (e.g., PDF documents, spreadsheets and charts). A diary study with follow-up individual interviews (23 participants with mixed abilities from 5 teams) and 2 separate focus groups (7 participants from 2 other teams) allowed us to characterize key dimensions of the role of representations in the workplace into four types of interrelated failures and workarounds, influenced by workplace stigmas and shaped by evolving social dynamics towards interdependent information work. We contribute this new empirically supported conceptual understanding of representation use in workplaces that can help design and improve the experiences of mixed-ability teams doing knowledge work in the current technological landscape.