"Hey, Can You Add Captions?": The Critical Infrastructuring Practices of Neurodiverse People on TikTok

TL;DR

This paper explores how neurodiverse TikTok creators engage in grassroots infrastructuring practices to enhance platform accessibility, especially through creative editing and captioning, highlighting the evolving nature of accessibility as a sociotechnical construct.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of critical infrastructuring among neurodiverse creators on TikTok, revealing bottom-up practices that shape platform accessibility and adapt to top-down infrastructural changes.

Findings

Creators actively modify editing and captioning tools for accessibility

Introduction of auto-captioning shifts creators' infrastructuring practices

Accessibility practices are conceptualized as incidental care work

Abstract

Accessibility efforts, how we can make the world usable and useful to as many people as possible, have explicitly focused on how we can support and allow for the autonomy and independence of people with disabilities, neurotypes, chronic conditions, and older adults. Despite these efforts, not all technology is designed or implemented to support everyone's needs. Recently, a community-organized push by creators and general users of TikTok urged the platform to add accessibility features, such as closed captioning to user-generated content, allowing more people to use the platform with greater ease. Our work focuses on an understudied population -- people with ADHD and those who experience similar challenges -- exploring the creative practices people from this community engage in, focusing on the kinds of accessibility they create through their creative work. Through an interview study exploring the experiences of creatives on TikTok, we find that creatives engage in critical infrastructuring -- a process of bottom-up (re)design -- to make the platform more accessible despite the challenges the platform presents to them as creators. We present these critical infrastructuring practices through the themes of: creating and augmenting video editing infrastructures and creating and augmenting video captioning infrastructures. We reflect on the introduction of a top-down infrastructure - the implementation of an auto-captioning feature - shifts the critical infrastructure practices of content creators. Through their infrastructuring, creatives revised sociotechnical capabilities of TikTok to support their own needs as well as the broader needs of the TikTok community. We discuss how the routine of infrastructuring accessibility is actually best conceptualized as incidental care work. We further highlight how accessibility is an evolving sociotechnical construct, and forward the concept of contextual accessibility.