Emerging social media platforms and online marketplaces introduce new ways for individuals to sell and distribute handmade or custom items. This new landscape of online tools has the potential to provide work opportunities for people who are excluded from traditional workplaces due to inaccessible environments and work expectations. The present study involves an analysis of the work practices of 44 disabled creators who sell and promote their goods via online marketplaces. Through an analysis of publicly available content on Etsy and social media platforms, complemented with semi-structured interviews with a subset of creators, we report on the ways disabled sellers create, share and provide support through their practices. Our analysis reveals that creators move their work to an online space seeking more accessible ways to earn income, yet find themselves navigating access barriers that are enacted through platform norms, reward structures and algorithms. We discuss how online marketplaces present unique opportunities and challenges to participation for people with disabilities.

The rise of maker communities and fabrication tools creates new opportunities for participation in design work. With this has come an interest in increasing the accessibility of making for people with disabilities, which has mainly emphasized independence and empowerment through the creation of more accessible fabrication tools. To understand and rethink the notion of accessible making, we analyze the context and practices of a particular site of making: the communal weaving studio within an assisted living facility for people with vision impairments. Our analysis helps reconsider the material and social processes that constitute accessible making, including the ways makers attend to interactive material properties, negotiate co-creative embodied work, and value the labor of making. We discuss future directions for design and research on accessible making while highlighting tensions around assistance, collaboration, and how disabled labor is valued.

Haptic feedback displays are an emerging technology that have the potential to enhance how children and their parents interact with and learn about science concepts. Yet, we know little about how to design haptic feedback applications for science learning or how children and their parents make use of these interactive features. This paper presents the design and evaluation of TCircuit, an application for a variable friction touch-screen display (i.e., Tanvas Tablet) that enables parent-child dyads to feel electric current flowing through a circuit diagram by touching the display. We describe results from a formative design study with 10 parent-child dyads that reveal which texture patterns and mappings are most appropriate for representing the concept of electrical current through haptic feedback. We also report results of a comparative study with 40 parent-child dyads in a museum setting. Our analysis shows that dyads in the haptic condition performed slightly better when predicting their answers to learning tasks. However, we found that haptic feedback introduced new complexities for how dyads perceived and discussed the exhibit content. We discuss the potential for haptic feedback displays to support science learning, particularly in collaborative settings, and design considerations for future systems.

Community-based approaches to participatory design, such as the design workshop, promise to engage underserved populations in collaborative dialog and provide a platform for promoting the views of communities who are not typically given a space to engage in design. Yet, we know little about how design workshops as a research site can engage underserved individuals (i.e., due to class, race, or age status) or address personal concerns (e.g., health). As a way of exploring these issues, we conducted a series of five design workshops with low-income African-American older adults to understand their health experiences. Our findings reveal three insights associated with the design workshop and the topic of health: comfort with community versus personal health; the sociocultural configuration of interaction; and empowerment in the context of systematic inequality of opportunity. We discuss the importance of understanding the situated nature of design workshops, particularly when engaging underserved groups in the topic of health, and the potential of the design workshop as a mechanism for activism.

While parents of young children regularly make decisions about sharing content about their child or family online, we know less about how they create, produce, and share video-based content of children with stigmatizing experiences. Through an analysis of publicly available content on YouTube, supplemented with semi-structured interviews, we report on the ways in which parents of children with developmental disabilities produce, share, and interact with others through videos of their children's experiences. Our analysis finds that parents disclose child information on YouTube to build authenticity, connect with others, advocate for social change, and justify monetization and child involvement. We discuss tensions between parents' practices and the ethical complexities of sharing and studying parent-generated content featuring children with disabilities.