Investigating Situated Practices of Access-Making with People with Disabilities Using Access Technology at Work

Literature in EMCA has studied how people with disabilities use computational technologies spanning mobile phones, or robots to accomplish different tasks (Nielsen et al., 2024; Due, 2023). Video ethnography and the transcription of gaze, talk, and gestures are valuable to understand how people’s diverse interactions with technology and others cannot be anticipated but studied in situ. Recording and transcribing videos of these interactions facilitates a granular analysis of what people and technologies accomplish as an assemblage of distributed agents (Due, 2024). Building on these studies we investigate how accessibility, understood as a practice (Muñoz, 2023) not only a quality of designed things, emerges as a distributed accomplishment in the interaction between people and technology. Drawing on video ethnographic data with a blind participant and wheelchair user respectively, we analyse how accessibility is accomplished in specific work situations. As such we focus on analyzing in detail how participants, their colleagues, and access technologies, as an assemblage, create different forms of accessibility _in situ._ The analysis informs EMCA studies of technology use centering people with disabilities in workplace studies, while also grounding a theoretical discussion in science and technology studies and EMCA on the concept of accessibility as a frictional and ongoing practice (Hamraie & Fritsch, 2019) embedded in situated uses of technology (Oudshoorn & Pinch, 2003) and sociomaterial interactions.