"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

TL;DR

This study explores how diverse visual abilities affect information work in teams, identifying barriers, workarounds, and social dynamics to improve collaborative experiences for blind and sighted colleagues.

Contribution

It provides an empirically grounded conceptual framework for understanding representation use and challenges in mixed-ability workplace teams.

Findings

Identified four types of failures and workarounds in information representations.

Workplace stigmas influence how teams adapt to visual ability differences.

Social dynamics evolve to shape interdependent information work.

Abstract

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.