Blind and low-vision (BLV) employees in mixed-visual ability teams often encounter information (e.g., PDFs, diagrams) in inaccessible formats. To enable teamwork, teams must transform these representations by modifying or re-creating them into accessible forms. However, these transformations are frequently overlooked, lack infrastructural support, and cause additional labour. To design systems that move beyond one-off accommodations to effective mixed-ability collaboration, we need a deeper understanding of the representations, their transformations and how they occur. We conducted a week-long diary study with follow-up interviews with 23 BLV and sighted professionals from five legal, non-profit, and consulting teams, documenting 36 transformation cases. Our analysis characterizes how teams perform representational transformations for accessibility: how they are triggered proactively or reactively, how they simplify or enhance, and four common patterns in which workers coordinate with each other to address representational incompatibility. Our findings uncover opportunities for designing systems that can better support mixed-visual ability work.

Diagrams often appear as node-link representations in contexts such as taxonomies, mind maps and networks in textbooks. Despite their pervasiveness, they present accessibility challenges for blind and low-vision people. To address this challenge, we introduce Touch-and-Audio-based Diagram Access (TADA), a tablet-based interactive system that makes diagram exploration accessible through musical tones and speech. We designed TADA informed by an interview study with 15 participants who shared their challenges and strategies with diagrams. TADA enables people to access a diagram by: i) engaging in open-ended touch-based explorations, ii) searching for nodes, iii) navigating between nodes and iv) filtering information. We evaluated TADA with 25 participants and found it useful for gaining different perspectives on diagrammatic information.