Co-Design to Deconstruct Digital Accessibility. a Participatory Journey at the Finger Tips of an App.
Co-Design to Deconstruct Digital Accessibility. a Participatory Journey at the Finger Tips of an App.
Wednesday, 9 July 2025
Location: Poster Area (Faculty of Education Sciences (FSE))
Poster
The aim of this paper is to reflect on the complexity of social vulnerability from an intersectional point of view in relation to co-design processes involving participatory methods capable of bringing individuals and private companies into dialogue. The reflection starts from a specific case study related to the construction of an app for online and on-site use of cultural itineraries in partnership with a private organisation. We ask ourselves the following questions: How does the corporate system guide operational decisions? What are the challenges and opportunities in creating more equitable and inclusive access, particularly in relation to disability?
Recovering the matrix of systemic domination proposed by Adams and Zuniga (2016) and systematised with the application proposed by Antonucci, Sorice and Volterrani (2022), we reconstruct the decision-making process in the different aspects of the work carried out over a period of six months (April-October 2024), focusing in particular on the identity and epistemic dimension of disability. Following the growing scholarly debate in the field of digital accessibility and artificial intelligence, supported by a bottom-up social justice perspective, and understood as present and future public spaces that are increasingly central to the negotiation of independence and power for disabled people (among others Goggin and Soldatic, 2022; Newman-Griffis et al., 2023; Zhang and Goggin, 2024), we rely on ongoing participant observation work, including participation in specific resources such as the creative method of the world café, as well as in-depth interviews with an extended team of 20 people (Jorgensen, 2011; Pink, 2015). Broad operational and theoretical limits, virtues and risks emerge, laying the foundations for looking at the potential of a guided co-construction of the de facto deconstruction of the very concept of accessibility, better expressed as plural and therefore real usability.
Recovering the matrix of systemic domination proposed by Adams and Zuniga (2016) and systematised with the application proposed by Antonucci, Sorice and Volterrani (2022), we reconstruct the decision-making process in the different aspects of the work carried out over a period of six months (April-October 2024), focusing in particular on the identity and epistemic dimension of disability. Following the growing scholarly debate in the field of digital accessibility and artificial intelligence, supported by a bottom-up social justice perspective, and understood as present and future public spaces that are increasingly central to the negotiation of independence and power for disabled people (among others Goggin and Soldatic, 2022; Newman-Griffis et al., 2023; Zhang and Goggin, 2024), we rely on ongoing participant observation work, including participation in specific resources such as the creative method of the world café, as well as in-depth interviews with an extended team of 20 people (Jorgensen, 2011; Pink, 2015). Broad operational and theoretical limits, virtues and risks emerge, laying the foundations for looking at the potential of a guided co-construction of the de facto deconstruction of the very concept of accessibility, better expressed as plural and therefore real usability.