Accessibility in Collaborative Writing

In this project, we investigate how people with vision impairments interact with collaborative writing tools (e.g., Microsoft Word, Google Docs) to produce shared documents with their sighted collaborators, the challenges they encounter in developing collaboration awareness (i.e., understanding who commented or edited what and where in the document), and how they establish shared norms and workarounds to adapt to the complexities of collaborative features. Our work also uncovers how accessibility in collaborative work is shaped by interpersonal relations, power dynamics, and organizational ableism.

Building on the insights gathered from interviews and observations with blind writers, we have built and evaluated new auditory techniques and a Google Docs extension called Co11ab to support accessible collaborative writing in both asynchronous and synchronous settings.