Disabled and neurodivergent LGBTQIA+ individuals often co-create adaptive communication practices within their romantic partnerships; however, little is known about how these strategies evolve over time. We present findings from a diary and co-design study with five disabled LGBTQIA+ partnerships, documenting how communication is negotiated and sustained through shifting relational, emotional, and access needs. We argue that this ongoing work constitutes a relational infrastructure – the communicative system of shared practices, adaptive routines, and negotiated meanings that disabled and neurodivergent LGBTQIA+ partners co-create to navigate their shared lives. To model these dynamics, we introduce the Relational Access Framework for Communication (RAF-Comm): A Model for Disabled and Neurodivergent LGBTQIA+ Partnerships, a provisional and generative framework that centers identity, co-creation, and adaptation as fundamental to relational accessibility. Our findings highlight the conditional use of technology and the importance of non-use as a valid, relationship-preserving choice. We conclude with design implications for technologies that support the personal, continuously evolving ecosystems of care these partnerships create for themselves.

Intimacy is a complex, multifaceted subject of importance within disability rights movements.Disabled individuals are entitled to the same universal human rights (e.g., marriage, sexual and reproductive self-determination) as everyone else.Assistive measures that support equity in their personal lives remain central to these movements.However, the research community's relatively narrow focus of what "intimacy" is (i.e., primarily concerned with sex) combined with factors, such as context, cultural sensitivities, power dynamics and complex ethics, has resulted in its limited exploration in HCI Accessibility Research.Among the relatively small body of HCI literature, most works approach disabled intimacies through a primarily deficit-oriented and heteronormative lens.Notably, ASSETS has featured only two papers on this subject in the past 23 years [53].Moreover, few studies in HCI explore the methodological and ethical considerations of researching disabled intimacies, and even fewer are disability-led and include queer perspectives [53].In this half-day virtual workshop, we invite engineers, technology design and development researchers, industry practitioners, accessibility * These authors contributed equally to this research and share first authorship of this publication.

CHI 2025: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Yokohama Japan, 26 April 2025- 1 May 2025

Blind and low-vision (BLV) university students often encounter campus accessibility challenges that impede their ability to navigate campus environments effectively. The lack of customization offered by some navigational-focused assistive technologies (ATs) often falls short in addressing their diverse and specific navigational needs. 3D printing, a promising tool for creating affordable and personalized aids, has been explored as a method to create customized tactile maps to aid BLV individuals with general navigation. However, the use of 3D-printed tactile maps by BLV university students and the impact of their direct involvement in the design process remain largely unexplored. We employed a participatory design (PD) approach to engage BLV students from a university in the United States (U.S.) through semi-structured interviews and a co-design session to create a prototype 3D-printed tactile map. Additionally, we consulted with a blind rehabilitation and independence expert for insight into their perspective on AT and, more specifically, tactile maps and showed the prototype to a group of visually impaired youth and instructors visiting our university for feedback. We present and discuss our findings, provide an overview of the prototype design process, and outline future work.

In this study, we explore the experiences of LGBTQIA+ individuals with disabilities in community centers in the United States, with a focus on the role of assistive technology (AT). Our research addresses three key questions: (1) How do LGBTQIA+ individuals with disabilities navigate intersecting identities in community centers? (2) How do social connections impact AT use in these environments? (3) How do community center norms and structures influence AT use? Through 11 semi-structured interviews, we examine the challenges and barriers faced by people with disabilities, their motivations for visiting centers, the impact of social dynamics, structures, and norms on AT use, and the importance of social connections. To address these challenges and foster lasting change, we offer recommendations for designing more inclusive and affordable AT, nurturing interdependence, and promoting collaboration between LGBTQIA+ community centers and disability organizations.

The future of accessibility research is a topic we take up every day as researchers; yet it is important also to step back and ask ourselves about the most important, and overlooked, areas for inquiry in our field. With the rapid pace of change in both computational capabilities and the environmental, social, and political context in which disability plays out, we believe this is a critical time for such inquiry. This is even more important given the relatively narrow set of topics that accessibility research has focused on for most of our field’s history. We invite our community to come together to define what the next generation of accessibility research should engage with.