At the Technology, Equity, and Accessibility (TEA) Lab at Northeastern University, we aim to make collaboration, creative work, and learning more accessible and equitable for people with disabilities. Our research sits at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), and Accessible Computing, with a focus on understanding, designing, and building accessible collaborative technologies for ability-diverse teams, i.e., teams involving people with and without disabilities.

We take a community-centered approach that involves contextual interviews, ethnographic field observations, and long-term involvement with community partners to develop a nuanced understanding of how accessibility is shaped by people’s interaction with each other and with the physical and digital systems in their workspace. Building on our formative work, we iteratively design, develop, and evaluate new technologies to enhance accessibility in collaboration, creative work, and learning for disabled people. We also draw on Disability Studies scholarship to critically interrogate the roles technologies play in reshaping group dynamics and redistributing the labor of creating access in ability-diverse teams.

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