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Design for Social Accessibility Method Cards: Engaging Users and Reflecting on Social Scenarios for Accessible Design

Published: 16 January 2020 Publication History

Abstract

This article is an extended version of our 2018 ASSETS paper entitled, “Incorporating Social Factors in Accessible Design.” In our ASSETS paper, we demonstrated the viability of the Design for Social Accessibility perspective through a series of user-centered workshops with professional designers. With this expanded article, we conducted a follow-up research study with a user-centered design course that examined the use of Design for Social Accessibility Method Cards over a longer design cycle, specifically as the method and cards contributed to a term-long project, rather than just a workshop. We also offer a new analysis on work leading to the development of Design for Social Accessibility, with a focus on how practical considerations in the design process influence how designers engage accessible design. We found that the concrete and real-life scenarios in the Design for Social Accessibility Method Cards helped mediate useful interactions between student designers and deaf and hard-of-hearing users. In addition, we identified how practical choices in investigating strategies for socially accessible design enabled designers to center disabled perspectives. The contributions of this work—when added to the findings of our ASSETS 2018 paper on incorporating social factors—demonstrate the viability of Design for Social Accessibility by providing: (1) empirical data showing that designers can use the Design for Social Accessibility perspective and method cards to generate accessible designs and appropriately engage deaf and hard-of-hearing users to incorporate social considerations; and (2) a summative analysis highlighting practical steps for how designers can use the Design for Social Accessibility perspective and methods cards to create accessible designs.

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    Published In

    cover image ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing
    ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing  Volume 12, Issue 4
    Regular Papers and Special Issue on ASSETS 2018
    December 2019
    158 pages
    ISSN:1936-7228
    EISSN:1936-7236
    DOI:10.1145/3375992
    Issue’s Table of Contents
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 16 January 2020
    Accepted: 01 October 2019
    Revised: 01 September 2019
    Received: 01 April 2019
    Published in TACCESS Volume 12, Issue 4

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    Author Tags

    1. Design workshops
    2. accessibility
    3. user-centered design

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