Collaboration and community building are crucial for equitable participation in research, especially in disability and accessibility research fields.Engaging with communities of disabled individuals helps understand their unique challenges, expectations, and needs, which should be reflected in assistive technology design.However, a gap exists between research in resource-rich societies and the practices of low-resource settings, where socio-economic and infrastructural constraints are often overlooked.Conversely, the innovation and sustainable solutions in these settings are often

Location-based online services, such as Google Maps, provide a valuable lens for examining social dynamics in both online (virtual) and offline (physical) spaces. In particular, online reviews offer insights into how cultural or ethnic differences shape mobility patterns, place preferences, and public expression. This study analyzes the spatial behaviour of select ethnic groups in a German border city by integrating Google Maps reviews with demographic data. Using comparative analysis, we identify patterns in place engagement and disparities in urban space usage across different population groups. The findings highlight how socio-demographic factors influence the frequency and types of places visited, revealing gaps in urban accessibility. These insights demonstrate the potential of Google Maps data for understanding socio-spatial dynamics and inform strategies for more inclusive and data-driven urban planning.

Postcolonial and decolonial computing examines how technology design and adoption can perpetuate subtle dimensions of coloniality, under-represent certain regions (e.g., the Global South, non-Western regions, Indigenous societies), and marginalize them. There has been a growing interest in interdisciplinary research focusing on marginalized communities, including accessibility and participatory research. Despite the rapid expansion of accessibility research in the last decades, little focus is placed on accessibility issues within marginalized societies, hindering them from effectively benefiting from accessibility research discussions and outcomes. The accessibility and HCI communities still lack comprehensive knowledge on conducting interdisciplinary research that includes diverse cultures and experiences from some of the systematically marginalized regions. This workshop will explore the intersection of accessibility, HCI, and cross-regional studies, bringing together researchers and practitioners to foster collaborations, identify under-explored research areas, and develop guidelines to support inclusive research practices.

Mentoring is crucial for teachers' professional development but challenges of access, resources and capacity make it difficult for regular in-person mentorship in low-infrastructure contexts. Mobile technologies such as social media have the potential to scale teacher professional development and communities. This paper explores the culture of teacher mentorship in rural Cote d'Ivoire and the motivations and challenges mentors face in using mobile technology in their work through semi-structured interviews with 33 teacher mentors. We found that mentors valued social connections and knowledge sharing in using mobile technology. However, power dynamics between teachers and mentors affected how they could collaborate. Mentors also expressed frustrations with the lack of moderation within social media groups. Lack of infrastructure and connectivity also raise potential issues of inclusion and access to rural areas and schools. We conclude with design recommendations for technologies that scale culturally-relevant teaching mentorship in low-infrastructure contexts.

As governments in developing countries race to solve the global learning crisis, a key focus is on novel teaching approaches as taught in pedagogical programs. To scale, these pedagogical programs rely on government teacher training infrastructure. However, these programs face challenges in rural parts of Africa where there is a lack of advisor support, teachers are isolated and technology infrastructure is still emerging. Conversational agents have addressed some of these challenges by scaling expert knowledge and providing personalized interactions, but it is unclear how this work can translate to rural African contexts. To explore the use of such technology in this design space, we conducted two related studies. The first was a qualitative study with 20 teachers and ministry officials in rural Côte d’Ivoire to understand opportunities and challenges in technology use for these stakeholders. Second, we shared a conversational agent probe over WhatsApp to 38 teachers for 14-weeks to better understand what we learned in the survey and to uncover realistic use cases from these stakeholders. Our findings were examined through a theoretical lens of aspirations to discover sustainable design directions for conversational agents to support teachers in low infrastructure settings.

Access to literacy is critical to children's futures, but formal education may be insufficient for fostering early literacy, especially in low-resource contexts. Educational technologies used at home may be able to help, but it is unclear whether or how children (and families) will use such technologies at home in rural communities, particularly in low-literate families. In this paper, we investigate these questions with a voice-based literacy technology deployed with families in 8 rural communities in Côte d'Ivoire for 4 months. We use interviews and observations with 37 families to investigate motivations, methods, and barriers for rural families' engagement with a literacy technology accessible via feature phones. We contribute insights into how families view digital literacy as a learning goal, leverage networks of supporters, and over time, transition from explicit to implicit support for children's learning.

Teaching is challenging in rural areas in developing countries because of large classroom sizes, limited basic infrastructure, and lack of teacher training. Teachers' impact on educational outcomes can be improved by teacher training programs but these programs are limited by poor infrastructure in rural areas. Although infrastructural challenges can be overcome by information technology today, it is unclear how such technology can support teacher training. Therefore to explore opportunities for teacher training in rural developing contexts with technology, we conducted interviews and observations with 22 primary school teachers in two regions of rural Côte d'Ivoire. We followed an aspirations-based approach that focuses on the user's aspirations (long term desires) to help understand teachers' intrinsic desire to grow in their professional life. We found that teacher aspirations conflict with their current role but their solidarity helps them find education role models who balance this conflict. We found that teachers face challenges in teacher training but they handle issues through their solidarity and by creating solutions. We then discuss ways to measure impact on aspirations, designing for conflicting aspirations and to leverage aspirations to create a social change in teacher training using technology.

Social media messaging applications(i.e. WhatsApp, Facebook) have reached 2.3 billion users in 2019, with the majority of users emerging from developing countries. The high usage among emergent users opens the possibility of designing text-based interventions for social change but such interventions rely on experts (i.e. doctors, educators, and moderators) knowledge which is scarce in developing contexts. Expert knowledge can be scaled up using chatbots but more research is needed to support emergent users who need context-specific support such as local language interventions or may not have regular internet connectivity. Therefore to support the design of chatbot based interventions in low resource contexts, we built DIA a chatbot architecture for low resource contexts to scale expert knowledge and support localization. DIA is a human-chatbot (humbot) hybrid system that organically learns topic-specific knowledge and local language from user interactions. We built a preliminary version of DIA on WhatsApp and deployed it to mentor 38 teachers in a rural context of Côte d'Ivoire. Through our preliminary deployment, we show that DIA can help (1) build a data-set of a topic and language-specific dialogues (2) understand users' online smartphone usage through chat logs and (3) collect survey data for through conversational interaction.

Low levels of childhood literacy in global contexts may be mitigated by educational technologies, however, these technologies often rely on parents of sufficient literacy to effectively support their children. Given low levels of adult literacy in many low-resource contexts, we investigate the nature of low-literate adult support for children's use of a literacy technology designed to foster early literacy precursors. We deployed an interactive voice response (IVR) system with 38 families in a rural village in Côte d'Ivoire using the IVR for 5 weeks in their homes. Using call log data and grounded theory analyses of IVR observations and interviews, we find evidence that families leverage complex support networks where family members support children's use of the IVR in different ways, via a collective network of intermediaries. These results suggest opportunities to scaffold low-literate family supporters for educational technologies.

Housing quality can impact quality of life factors such as physical health and finances. However, prospective tenants lack critical information about things like utility costs and landlord quality. Our contribution is a series of three studies exploring the complexities of the information economy around rental housing, including information available to landlords but not tenants, as well as information tenants may not prioritize until after lease signing about their own desires. Our first mixed methods study demonstrates that tenants cannot easily predict factors impacting the quality of life when selecting a rental and need better information about rental housing and the overall rental system. Using speed dating, we explore scenarios premised on information sharing and quality of life to analyze risks and rewards of crowdsourced information collection and sharing within a multi-stakeholder peer-to-peer rental search system. Finally, we present eDigs, a rental search system we have deployed to enhance the information economy for prospective tenants using a combination of opinion, implicit observation, and communal information. We also explore user responses to the system.