Infrastructuring for Access: Co-Designing Writing Tools with a Dyslexic Academic

Paper Title

Infrastructuring for Access: Co-Designing Writing Tools with a Dyslexic Academic

Publication Info

• Topic area: Accessible design for disabled professionals, focusing on writing tools.
• Keywords: Dyslexia, accessibility, HCI, infrastructuring, spell checkers, co-design, domain-specific language, access labor, Disability Studies, writing tools.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Existing writing tools, such as spell checkers, fail to support dyslexic writers effectively, especially when dealing with domain-specific or multilingual terminology. This results in substantial access labor for disabled practitioners.
• Significance: Writing is a critical aspect of academic and professional work. Addressing the shortcomings of assistive writing tools can reduce barriers to participation and alleviate the labor burden on dyslexic writers.
• Motivation and related work: Prior research has documented technological ableism and the breakdowns of spell checkers for minoritized communities, but the design space for assistive writing tools remains underexplored. Disability Studies critiques ableism but rarely provides actionable roadmaps for design. This paper builds on HCI and Disability Studies to propose a new approach.

Solution

• Proposed approach: Infrastructuring for Access, a design methodology combining HCI’s infrastructuring theory with Disability Studies to institutionalize disabled practitioners’ workarounds into permanent designs.
• Novelty:
  1. Introduces Jargon Manager, a toolkit for curating and composing with domain-specific language.
  2. Expands accessible design frameworks by focusing on reducing access labor and supporting disabled practitioners’ innovations.
  3. Synthesizes principles for Infrastructuring for Access to guide future accessible design.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Co-design process with a dyslexic academic to identify Points of Infrastructuring (PoIs).
  • Development of Jargon Manager as a browser extension and Google Docs add-on for saving and recalling jargon.
  • Eight-month field deployment to evaluate the toolkit in a naturalistic writing context.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • Aron, the dyslexic academic participant, added 167 words to his custom dictionary and inserted 112 words into documents during the deployment.
  • Jargon Manager reduced the need for repetitive access labor, such as triangulating spelling via search engines.
  • Enabled multilingual writing by incorporating Vietnamese terms alongside English academic jargon.
• Advantage over baselines:
  • Jargon Manager addressed breakdowns in spell checkers by enabling partial spelling searches, contextualized text presentation, and domain-specific language support.
  • Reduced reliance on labor-intensive hacks like search engines and manual corrections.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Longitudinal deployment with semi-structured interviews, co-design sessions, asynchronous communication, and interface logs.
  • Focused on ecological validity and capturing infrastructuring processes over eight months.
• Limitations and future work:
  • Depth prioritized over breadth; findings are based on a single case study.
  • Visual interface may not be accessible to screen reader users or those using voice-based typing.
  • Future work could explore adaptations for other modalities, collaborative writing contexts, and integration with programming environments.

Summary

This paper introduces Infrastructuring for Access, a design methodology that institutionalizes disabled practitioners’ workarounds into permanent tools, demonstrated through the development and deployment of Jargon Manager. The toolkit supports dyslexic writers by enabling custom dictionaries, partial spelling searches, and multilingual text input, reducing access labor and enhancing writing workflows. Findings from an eight-month field study with a dyslexic academic highlight the toolkit’s impact on domain-specific and multilingual writing. The proposed design principles and methodology offer a roadmap for creating accessible technologies that evolve with users’ needs and practices.