"Hey, Can You Add Captions?": The Critical Infrastructuring Practices of Neurodiverse People on TikTok

Accessibility efforts, how we can make the world usable and useful to as many people as possible, have explicitly focused on how we can support and allow for the autonomy and independence of people with disabilities, neurotypes, chronic conditions, and older adults. Despite these efforts, not all technology is designed or implemented to support everyone's needs. One technology that has recently been in the press for how challenging it can be for some creators to use is the short-form video sharing platform, TikTok.

Recently, a community-organized push by creators and general users of TikTok urged the platform to add accessibility features, such as closed captioning to user-generated content, allowing more people to use the platform with greater ease. Our work focuses on an understudied population-people with ADHD and those who experience similar challenges-exploring the creative practices people from this community engage in, focusing on the kinds of accessibility they create through their creative work. Through an interview study exploring the experiences of creatives on TikTok, we find that creatives engage in critical infrastructuring-a process of bottomup (re)design-to make the platform more accessible despite the challenges the platform presents to them as creators. We present these, bottom up, critical infrastructuring practices through the themes of: creating and augmenting video editing infrastructures and creating and augmenting video captioning infrastructures. We then reflect on how the introduction of a top-down infrastructure -the implementation of an auto-captioning feature -shifts the critical infrastructure practices of content creators. Through their infrastructuring, creatives were revising the broader sociotechnical capabilities of TikTok to support their own needs as well as the broader needs of the TikTok community. We discuss how the routine of infrastructuring accessibility is actually best conceptualized as incidental care work. We further highlight how accessibility is an evolving sociotechnical construct, and forward the concept of contextual accessibility.

CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in collaborative and social computing.