As video has become the dominant mode of content on platforms such as YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, captioning has emerged as a critical factor for accessibility, engagement, and visibility. While prior studies have examined different types of social media video captions or communities’ captioning usage, a systematic synthesis has not been undertaken, leading to the risk of proposing interventions that overlook core platform constraints or miss critical accessibility needs. This paper reviews 36 peer-reviewed papers published between 2015 and 2025 across fields such as Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), accessibility, media studies, education, and language learning. We note that captions operate as collective infrastructure co-produced by viewers, creators, and platforms. Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH), neurodivergent, and multilingual viewers depend on captions and increasingly expect mechanisms for feedback, while creators face inadequate tool support. Building on these insights, we propose the framework of Participatory Captioning and suggest design implications, highlighting future directions for social media video caption research.

Accessibility research has a broad mandate: use technology to make the world more accessible to disabled people. Yet, as a field, accessibility research lacks a clear characterization of what "accessibility" is. Furthermore, it has been historically limited in who is designed for, focusing on specific types of disability and often failing to consider how disability intersects with other identities. We set out to explicate what it means to make something accessible, grounded in the lived experiences of a diverse group of 25 disabled people. From our empirical findings, we develop a process for modeling accessibility. First, an individual assesses their experience of inaccess, specifically, the type of barrier they face, the technology repertoire they possess, and the contextual factors that shape how they address accessibility barriers. Then, having assessed an access barrier, they perform consequence calculus, weighing all available options to achieve access and deciding upon the option that best matches their priorities. We highlight the situated nature of access; people's identities, contextual factors, repertoires, and priorities all dictate their experience of accessibility.

a reproduction of a tactile graphic made through thermoforming over the original.Images from the National Braille Press [29].

Record soundsTrain personalized model Iteratively test Figure 1: Overview of the SPECTRA pipeline.In an interactive machine learning training workfow, users collect audio data samples (left), flter their data into a training dataset (center), and assess their model's performance in a live environment (right).The design includes key elements to support the needs of DHH users during this process, including spectrogram and waveform audio visualizations of audio, data annotating to save useful contextual information, and an interactive clustering visualization of their dataset.

A significant body of human-computer interaction accessibility research explores ways technology can improve communication access. Yet, this research infrequently engages other fields with complementary expertise – namely disability studies, Deaf studies, disability justice, and communication studies. To facilitate interdisciplinary communication access research, we synthesize thinking from these four fields into a framework of collective communication access. We then analyze human-centered accessibility-focused captioning research published between 2013 and 2023, investigating how collective communication access principles are or are not employed. We find that, while the majority of captioning research does not demonstrate a collective communication access approach, it reaches a baseline of targeting change toward inaccessible technical infrastructures and engaging d/Deaf and hard of hearing people as captioning experts. The small body of work that aligns with our framework, however, demonstrates that designing to change discriminatory social conditions and engaging conversation partners in access is a promising direction for future work.

As user-generated video dominates media landscapes, it poses an accessibility challenge. While disability advocacy groups globally have secured hard-won accessibility regulations for broadcast media, no such regulation of user-generated content exists. Yet, one major player in this shift, TikTok, has a culture of user-generated, creative captioning. We sought to understand how TikTok videos are captioned and the impact current practices have on those who need captions to access audio content. Therefore, we conducted a content analysis of 300 open-captioned TikToks and contextualized these findings by interviewing nine caption users. We found that the current state of TikTok captioning does facilitate access to the platform but that a user-generated, social video-specific standard for captioning could improve caption quality and expand access. We contribute an empirical account of the state of TikTok captioning and outline steps toward a standard for user-generated captioning.

People with disabilities face extra hardship in institutions of higher education because of accessibility barriers built into the educational system. While prior work investigates the needs of individual stakeholders, this work offers insights into the communication and collaboration between key stakeholders in creating access in institutions of higher education. The authors present reflections from their experiences working with disability service offices to meet their access needs and the results from interviewing 6 professors and 6 other disabled students about their experience in achieving access. Our results indicate that there are rich opportunities for technological solutions to support these stakeholders in communicating about and creating access.

Accessibility research strives to develop technology that is useful for disabled people, but the research processes that we engage in do not always center disabled people in a way that allows us to shape artifacts so that they benefit disabled communities. In this workshop, we want to address core questions that are relevant in this context: How can research questions be defined in a way that shares power between research teams and technology users? How should research processes be designed to be broadly accessible for disabled people? And what are equitable ways of summarizing and sharing research findings in a way that allows disabled communities to critically appraise findings with us? Through discussion among all attendees, we want to develop a practical guide in disability-centered research that will be made available and further developed as a community resource when engaging in accessibility research.

With improvements in automated speech recognition and increased use of videoconferencing, real-time captioning has changed significantly. This shift toward broadly available but less accurate captioning invites exploration of the role hearing conversation partners play in shaping the accessibility of a conversation to d/Deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) captioning users. While recent work has explored DHH individuals’ videoconferencing experiences with captioning, we focus on established groups’ current practices and priorities for future tools to support more accessible online conversations. Our study consists of three codesign sessions, conducted with four groups (17 participants total, 10 DHH, 7 hearing). We found that established groups crafted social accessibility norms that met their relational contexts. We also identify promising directions for future captioning design, including the need to standardize speaker identification and customization, opportunities to provide behavioral feedback during a conversation, and ways that videoconferencing platforms could enable groups to set and share norms.

Accessible design and technology could support the large and growing group of people with chronic illnesses. However, human computer interactions (HCI) has largely approached people with chronic illnesses through a lens of medical tracking or treatment rather than accessibility. We describe and demonstrate a framework for designing technology in ways that center the chronically ill experience. First, we identify guiding tenets: 1) treating chronically ill people not as patients but as people with access needs and expertise, 2) recognizing the way that variable ability shapes accessibility considerations, and 3) adopting a theoretical understanding of chronic illness that attends to the body. We then illustrate these tenets through autoethnographic case studies of two chronically ill authors using technology. Finally, we discuss implications for technology design, including designing for consequence-based accessibility, considering how to engage care communities, and how HCI research can engage chronically ill participants in research.

Oftentimes human computer interactions (HCI) accessibility research designs technology to support Deaf and disabled people in their existing social contexts. I, instead, propose an approach to accessible technology design that follows the disability justice principle of collective access, envisioning hearing and nondisabled people as key participants in making interactions accessible. Using captioning as a case study, I explore ways that technology could support accessible social norms, achieved by first paying close attention to the social, environmental, and technical factors that shape access for d/Deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) captioning users. My dissertation work will consist of four studies; 1) an exploration of the factors that shape DHH people's current experiences with and future preferences for captioning tools, 2) codesigning features to support accessible group communication with mixed groups of DHH and hearing people, 3) understanding TikTok captioning practices and their impact on DHH users, and 4) exploring the factors that influence professional captioners’ work.

As video conferencing (VC) has become increasingly necessary for many aspects of daily life, many d/Deaf and hard of hearing people, particularly those who communicate via sign language (signers), face distinct accessibility barriers. To better understand the unique requirements for participating in VC using a visual-gestural language, such as ASL, and to identify practical design considerations for signer-inclusive videoconferencing, we conducted 12 interviews and four co-design sessions with a total of eight d/Deaf signers and eight ASL interpreters. We found that participants’ access needs regarding consuming information (e.g., visual clarity of signs), communicating (e.g., getting attention of others), and collaborating (e.g., working with interpreter teams) are not well-met on existing VC platforms. We share novel insights into attending and conducting signer-accessible video conferences, outline considerations for future VC design, and provide guidelines for conducting remote research with d/Deaf signers.

Methods are fundamental to doing research and can directly impact who is included in scientific advances. Given accessibility research's increasing popularity and pervasive barriers to conducting and participating in research experienced by people with disabilities, it is critical to ask how methods are made accessible. Yet papers rarely describe their methods in detail. This paper reports on 17 interviews with accessibility experts about how they include both facilitators and participants with disabilities in popular user research methods. Our findings offer strategies for anticipating access needs while remaining flexible and responsive to unexpected access barriers. We emphasize the importance of considering accessibility at all stages of the research process, and contextualize access work in recent disability and accessibility literature. We explore how technology or processes could reflect a norm of accessibility. Finally, we discuss how various needs intersect and conflict and offer a practical structure for planning accessible research.

Accessibility research has grown substantially in the past few decades, yet there has been no literature review of the field. To understand current and historical trends, we created and analyzed a dataset of accessibility papers appearing at CHI and ASSETS since ASSETS' founding in 1994. We qualitatively coded areas of focus and methodological decisions for the past 10 years (2010-2019, N=506 papers), and analyzed paper counts and keywords over the full 26 years (N=836 papers). Our findings highlight areas that have received disproportionate attention and those that are underserved--for example, over 43% of papers in the past 10 years are on accessibility for blind and low vision people. We also capture common study characteristics, such as the roles of disabled and nondisabled participants as well as sample sizes (e.g., a median of 13 for participant groups with disabilities and older adults). We close by critically reflecting on gaps in the literature and offering guidance for future work in the field.

Real-time captioning is a critical accessibility tool for many d/Deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) people. While the vast majority of captioning work has focused on formal settings and technical innovations, in contrast, we investigate captioning for informal, interactive small-group conversations, which have a high degree of spontaneity and foster dynamic social interactions. This paper reports on semi-structured interviews and design probe activities we conducted with 15 DHH participants to understand their use of existing real-time captioning services and future design preferences for both in-person and remote small-group communication. We found that our participants' experiences of captioned small-group conversations are shaped by social, environmental, and technical considerations (e.g., interlocutors' pre-established relationships, the type of captioning displays available, and how far captions lag behind speech). When considering future captioning tools, participants were interested in greater feedback on non-speech elements of conversation (e.g., speaker identity, speech rate, volume) both for their personal use and to guide hearing interlocutors toward more accessible communication. We contribute a qualitative account of DHH people's real-time captioning experiences during small-group conversation and future design considerations to better support the groups being captioned, both in person and online.?