Dis/Abling Video Conferences

Abstract

This article addresses the question of access to video conferencing from the different perspectives of crip techno-science (Hamraie and Fritsch 2019), media ethnography, design theory, and the politics of inclusion during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.First, we describe a situation where a blind user and his sighted work assistant create access to a basically inaccessible online conferencing system via several workarounds.This example confronts the two different sensory-technical perspectives of both involved and diverse actors.In the second example, which is even more complex than the first one, a team of variously disabled employees who are blind, deaf or hard of hearing, and non-disabled colleagues and work assistants work out a branched path through a partially inaccessible video conferencing software.One of the team's work sessions we recorded serves as empirical material for the subsequent media and autoethnographic analyses.The focus is on the intertwined loops of interaction and communication between diverse sensory repertoires, technical tools, and social negotiation processes, which all together create a highly complex network of sensorysocio-technical dimensions.The paper analyses the two examples of circumventing "restricted access" (Ellcessor 2016) and shows how social negotiation processes attempt to construct hacks and workarounds that undermine or circumvent technologically inaccessible solutions for those that do not correspond to the so-called preferred user (Ellcessor 2016, 77; Ellis, Kao and Bitman 2020, 17).While those workarounds, detours, or shortcuts represent a temporary, socially and technologically conceivable solution, they nevertheless demand a great deal of time and organizational work (Schabacher 2017).A screen reader-ready website, revised screen reader logic, or a screen reader-accessible sharing function (example 1), as well as the efforts trying to synchronize spoken and written as well as heard and read language in distributed remote communication (example 2), are just two concrete examples that, on the one hand, demand improved design.Thus, another perspective, that of design theory, comes into play.Participatory, cocreative, and codesigned processes become meaningful on their 1 https://festival.

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