Ableist microaggressions remain pervasive in everyday interactions, yet interventions to help people recognize them are limited. We present an experiment testing how AI-mediated dialogue influences recognition of ableism. 160 participants completed a pre-test, intervention, and a post-test across four conditions: AI nudges toward bias (Bias-Directed), inclusion (Neutral-Directed), unguided dialogue (Self-Directed), and a text-only non-dialogue (Reading). Participants rated scenarios on standardness of social experience and emotional impact; those in dialogue-based conditions also provided qualitative reflections. Quantitative results showed dialogue-based conditions produced stronger recognition than Reading, though trajectories diverged: biased nudges improved differentiation of bias from neutrality but increased overall negativity. Inclusive or no nudges remained more balanced, while Reading participants showed weaker gains and even declines. Qualitative findings revealed biased nudges were often rejected, while inclusive nudges were adopted as scaffolding. We contribute a validated vignette corpus, an AI-mediated intervention platform, and design implications highlighting trade-offs conversational systems face when integrating bias-related nudges.

This paper presents an analytic autoethnography of three accessibility research projects, MouseClicker, Virtual Steps, and Simulated Conversations, led by the first author, a disabled researcher with Spinal Muscular Atrophy.Each project emerged from personal need and embodied experience, and together they explore new possibilities in accessible interaction, sensation, and social engagement.Drawing from feminist HCI, crip technoscience, and design justice, we argue that designing through disability is not simply a methodological stance but a form of epistemic resistance.We show how emotional labor, insider knowledge, and lived specificity can generate design insights that challenge normative assumptions about simplicity, generalizability, and what disabled users should want.Our contributions include: (1) documenting three disabilitycentered design interventions; (2) surfacing cross-cutting themes of agency, emotional labor, and epistemic friction; and (3) offering implications for reframing accessibility research as an inclusive, reflexive, and justice-oriented practice.This report invites the HCI community to recognize lived experience not as anecdotal, but as rigorous situated knowledge essential to equitable design.

Many people often take walking for granted, but for individuals with mobility disabilities, this seemingly simple act can feel out of reach. This reality can foster a sense of disconnect from the world since walking is a fundamental way in which people interact with each other and the environment. Advances in virtual reality and its immersive capabilities have made it possible to enable those who have never walked in their life to “virtually” experience walking. We co-designed a VR walking experience with a person with Spinal Muscular Atrophy who has been a lifelong wheelchair user. Over 9 days, we collected data on this person’s experience through a diary study and analyzed this data to better understand the design elements required. Given that they had only ever seen others walking and had not experienced it first-hand, determining which design parameters must be considered in order to match the virtual experience to their idea of walking was challenging. Generally, we found the experience of walking to be quite positive, providing a perspective from a higher vantage point than what was available in a wheelchair. Our findings provide insights into the emotional complexities and evolving sense of agency accompanying virtual walking. These findings have implications for designing more inclusive and emotionally engaging virtual reality experiences.