When Assistive Technologies become Provocations: Unpacking Access in HCI practices using Crip Technoscience, Mouth Interfaces, and XR

Paper Title

When Assistive Technologies become Provocations: Unpacking Access in HCI practices using Crip Technoscience, Mouth Interfaces, and XR

Publication Info

• Topic area: Accessibility in XR technologies and HCI practices through disability-led design and activism.
• Keywords: XR accessibility, assistive technologies, crip technoscience, narrative-flip method, mouth interfaces, activist design, disability justice, HCI education, solutionist critique, able-bodied assumptions.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: XR technologies predominantly rely on hand-based interaction, marginalizing users with severe motor disabilities. Accessibility in HCI is often treated as a checklist or afterthought, perpetuating able-bodied norms and solutionist approaches.
• Significance: Addressing these limitations is critical to ensuring equitable access to XR technologies and challenging systemic ableism in design practices.
• Motivation and related work: Prior HCI research has critiqued ableist assumptions embedded in assistive technologies, emphasizing the need for participatory, justice-oriented methods. However, mainstream approaches often fail to center disabled expertise or challenge normative design defaults.

Solution

• Proposed approach: A camera-based mouth interface designed collaboratively with disabled artists, positioned as an activist provocation rather than a technical fix.
• Novelty:
  1. Reframing assistive XR technologies as provocations to challenge able-bodied norms.
  2. Introducing the narrative-flip method to surface and reframe accessibility imaginaries.
  3. Empirical insights into how accessibility is conceptualized as fix, political, and agency.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Developed mouth interface prototypes tailored to disabled artists’ preferences.
  • Conducted a narrative-flip study with 14 early-stage HCI researchers, where participants first engaged with the interface without context and later learned its activist origins.
  • Analyzed participants’ reflections pre- and post-reveal to examine shifts in accessibility imaginaries.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • Participants initially framed the mouth interface as a solution for disability deficits but shifted toward recognizing its political and cultural dimensions post-reveal.
  • Persistent solutionist thinking was observed, even after the activist framing was disclosed.
  • Empathy emerged as a response but often reverted to ableist language and product-oriented interpretations.
• Advantage over baselines: The study exposed deeply ingrained able-bodied assumptions and solutionist biases in early-stage HCI researchers, highlighting the potential of activist provocations to unsettle these defaults.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Conducted with 14 master’s students in HCI, aged 21–26, using semi-structured interviews and thematic analysis.
  • Participants navigated a VR task using mouth gestures, followed by pre- and post-reveal reflections.
• Limitations and future work:
  • Potential demand characteristics may have influenced post-reveal responses.
  • Findings are limited to early-stage researchers in a single institutional context.
  • Risk of misinterpreting the study as disability simulation highlights the need for careful framing in future applications.

Summary

This paper reimagines assistive technologies in XR as provocations rather than solutions, using a disability-led mouth interface to challenge hand-centric and able-bodied defaults in design. Through a narrative-flip study, early-stage HCI researchers revealed accessibility imaginaries shifting from technical fixes to recognizing access as political and agential. Findings underscore the persistence of solutionist logics in design education and the potential of activist provocations to unsettle these assumptions. Future work should focus on co-creation with disabled collaborators and embedding disability-led practices in XR design and HCI pedagogy.