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

Disability Studies and Accessibility HCI document what design elements are (in)accessible to disabled communities and illuminate technological ableism. However, Disability Studies’ systemic critique rarely includes roadmaps for design. We articulate a roadmap by marrying HCI’s infrastructuring theory with Disability Studies into an approach called Infrastructuring for Access. Focusing on dyslexic writers’ experiences with spell checkers, we demonstrate Infrastructuring for Access in a collaborative design process. We co-designed software to address limitations of spell checkers and conducted an eight-month field deployment. Our technological contribution is Jargon Manager, a toolkit with a browser extension for writers to opportunistically save terms in a custom dictionary and then use later via a word processor extension. Our theory contribution moves from a space of critique into a space of repair: Infrastructuring for Access expands the design space from only removing barriers to also institutionalizing disabled practitioners’ existing workarounds, therefore alleviating access labor and broadening participation.