How Users Matter:Investigating Disabled People’s Creative Adaptations of Assistive Technology and AI at Work

People use digital technologies at work and at home in both mundane and creative ways to go about their day, accomplish tasks, and communicate. Assistive technology (AT) is a necessity for many disabled people to live a self-determining life. Yet not all parts of society are designed to be compatible with AT or interact smoothly with it. Nor do these technologies always work as expected. This can create inequalities in the labor market and other areas of society. The adoption of hybrid work, accessible computer vision technologies, "artificial intelligence"—such as large language models (LLMs)—presents both challenges and opportunities for how work tasks can be done differently. It is thus important to study how emergent and assistive technologies are used in practice (Oudshoorn and Pinch 2005). Using video ethnography and conversational multimodal analysis, we explore in collaboration with two research participants with disabilities their everyday uses of AT, computer vision and LLMs. We provide empirical contributions to STS focusing on human-technology relations in the world of work. We also offer new conceptualizations of expertise grounded in disabled people’s situated practices and interactions with emergent AT. As a methodological contribution, we demonstrate how ethnographers in STS can explore collaborative video ethnographic approaches to study human-technology relations to understand in detail how users of emergent technology creatively adapt technologies and produce new knowledge, practices, and expertise with them.