Abstract
This workshop aims at advancing a shift from technical to socio-technical and critical perspectives on inclusive technologies. Rather than treating accessibility as a purely technical feature or a compliance-based “box to tick,” the convenors conceptualise disability as culturally produced and socially structured and embedded in wider socio-material arrangements. In HCI and CSCW, diverse conceptualisations of research on assistive technologies are employed, oscillating between more technically oriented and more socio-technical starting points. This workshop aims to contribute to systematising these approaches and to critically examining their respective advantages and challenges. Keywords. Assistive Technology, Inclusive Technologies, Research and Design Methods, Participation.
1. From Technical to Critical Socio-Technical Approaches to Accessibility
Recent approaches in accessibility-focused HCI call for a reconfiguration of roles, positioning people with disabilities not merely as participants, but as active creators and innovators. Often framed within critical HCI, these approaches draw on socio-informatics and user-centered design while extending them through a disability empowerment lens. In doing so, they challenge dominant strands of accessibility research that prioritise technical solutions and frame their outcomes as “helping” or even “fixing” disability.
Within HCI and CSCW, diverse conceptualisations of research on assistive technologies are employed, oscillating between more technically oriented and more socio-technical starting points. While these approaches often coexist, they differ substantially in their underlying assumptions, methodological orientations, and understandings of accessibility. This workshop aims to contribute to systematising these approaches and to critically examining their respective advantages and challenges.
Against this backdrop, the workshop explicitly advances a shift from technical towards socio-technical and critical perspectives on inclusive technologies. Rather than treating accessibility as a purely technical feature or a compliance-based “box to tick,” we conceptualise disability as “culturally produced and socially structured” (Oliver, 1990), embedded in broader socio-material arrangements. Accordingly, accessibility is not understood as a binary state to be achieved, but as an ongoing, situated, and negotiated process.
At the same time, debates around participation raise important methodological and ethical questions: Who can design for whom? How can participation be inclusive, respectful, and equi