Writing is important for many careers. While writing tools continue to be studied in HCI, little attention has been paid to the accessibility of typesetting with LaTeX, a widespread markup language for preparing publications. In contrast to WYSIWYG (“What You See is What You Get”), co-authoring papers in LaTeX presents additional considerations with code, visual, and PDF content co-existing in an interface. Our collaborative autoethnography centers two neurodiverse teams preparing ACM SIGCHI publications using LaTeX interfaces. We illustrate how text customization constraints and collaborative clutter produce inaccessible visuals to dyslexic writers. In turn, we shift our conceptualization of design for dyslexia from intervening solely on fonts to understanding visual processing in the greater whole of technology-mediated communication. With this updated conceptualization, we discuss changes to improve writers’ agency through: (1) customization by text function, (2) presentation of collaboration cues, and (3) social support for a wider range of access labor.

A growing body of qualitative research has identified contextual risk factors that elevate people’s chances of experiencing digital-safety attacks. However, the lack of quantitative data on the population-level distribution of these risk factors prevents policymakers and tech companies from developing targeted, evidence-based interventions to improve digital safety. To address this gap, we surveyed 5,001 adults in the United States to analyze: (1) the frequency of and relationship between digital-safety attacks (e.g., scams, harassment, account hacking), and (2) how these attacks align with 10 contextual risk factors. Nearly half of our respondents identify as resource constrained, which significantly correlates with higher likelihood of experiencing four common attacks. We also present qualitative insights to expand our understanding of the factors beyond the existing literature (e.g., “prominence” included high-visibility roles in local communities). This study provides the first large-scale quantitative analysis correlating digital-safety attacks with contextual risk factors and demographics.

As smartphone and wearable tracking devices have grown in popularity, more individuals have begun collecting their own health data. While these data are often perceived as a persistent record of health and used to inform future behaviors, it is inevitable that some data are captured during a period of disruption or non-routine circumstances. If not appropriately contextualized, visualizations of these data can lead to missed opportunities in self-reflection, or worse, misinterpretation. To better understand how self-tracked data captured during non-routine circumstances are reflected upon after the disruption has ended, we interviewed women about how they might reflect on data from a recent pregnancy. We propose the concept of bounded situational context (BSC) to encapsulate how individuals define the boundaries of disruption within their data based on external and internal contexts. We discuss how self-tracking tools can be designed to align data visualizations with individuals’ perceived boundaries to aid in data interpretation.

Social platforms hold great promise for supporting marginalized communities, such as the LGBTQ+ community, yet they are frequently sites of further stigmatization and harm. By engaging a diverse sample of 31 US LGBTQ+ users in five qualitative, design-based value elicitation exercises, we find that misalignments between perceived platform values and the values of the marginalized users they serve are at the heart of this disconnect. We inductively identify two community-based design values for supporting LGBTQ+ users: self-determination and inclusion. These values can be used as design heuristics for both improving existing platforms as well as guiding future new platform development. Based on participant feedback, we provide directions for enacting these values to better align platform values with this marginalized population's needs.

Online spaces play crucial roles in the lives of most LGBTQ+ people, but can also replicate and exacerbate existing intracommunity tensions and power dynamics, potentially harming subgroups within this marginalized community. Using qualitative probes and interviews, we engaged a diverse group of 25 bi+ (attracted to more than one gender) people to explore these dynamics. We identify two types of intracommunity conflict that bi+ users face (validity and normative conflicts), and a resulting set of what we call latent harms, or coping strategies for dealing with conflict that have delayed negative psychological effects for bi+ users. Using intersectionality as a sensitizing concept to understand shifting power dynamics embedded in sociotechnical contexts, we discuss challenges for future design work including the need to account for intracommunity dynamics within marginalized groups and the utility of disentangling conflict from harm.

Most US social media users engage regularly with multiple platforms. For LGBTQ+ people, this means making self-presentation decisions not just on one platform, but many. These choices are made in the face of sometimes-overlapping platform environments, which can have consequentially different norms, audiences, and affordances. Moreover, many LGBTQ+ users face high stakes in online self-presentation, due to the risk of stigmatization of their LGBTQ+ identity, increasing the importance of self-presentation decisions that enable them to achieve their goals and avoid stigmatization. This combination of environmental complexity and high stakes is not adequately accounted for in existing work on self-presentation, but doing so is important to support and understand the experiences of LGBTQ+ and other potentially stigmatized users. We adopt an ecological approach to an interview and cognitive mapping study of 20 LGBTQ+ social media users. We find that participants employ the platforms, audiences, affordances, and norms within what we call their "personal social media ecosystems" to avoid stigmatization while still allowing for expression of their LGBTQ+ identity and the flexibility to adjust their presentation over time.