Universities in North America often frame accessibility as an individual responsibility, emphasizing individualized accommodations for disabled students. However, these systems do not always align with students’ access needs, leaving them to take on additional labour. At a Canadian university, we interviewed 13 student activists and leaders of disability-related groups. We investigate how disabled students collectively address access frictions that emerge from institutional infrastructure; adopting community practices that work with, within, and around the university to address gaps. Using the concept of ’routine infrastructuring’, we demonstrate how student groups leverage technologies to mobilize and negotiate access needs through informal and formal practices as collective care infrastructure. We introduce the concept of ’counteractive frictions’, which are produced collectively to disrupt and provoke negotiation with institutions. We call for scholars and designers to rethink ’infrastructuring’ as adapting and maintaining, which masks the politics and generative potentialities of friction to re-imagine disability futures.

Design equity toolkits are increasingly being invoked to address the ethical and political consequences of technology design, yet they are criticized for being either too generic or too narrow to address the complex realities of equity in design. To examine the intended purpose of these toolkits from creators’ perspectives and explore how designers envision using them in practice, we conducted a two-phase study: interviews with toolkit creators and a walkthrough demonstration workshop with early-career UX designers. Our findings highlight divergent values around toolkit functionality: while creators emphasize flexibility and reflection, early-career designers express a need for actionable pathways to help mediate design equity work within corporate hierarchies. We show how toolkits act as supports for articulation work in design equity, their role as boundary objects for values translation, and conclude by framing how design equity toolkits can be re-conceptualized as legitimacy-building artefacts with capacites to help early-designers advocate for more equitable futures.

Universities grow increasingly committed to equal access for individuals with disabilities, balancing the appearance of inclusion while upholding values of academic rigour. Within these universities, employees working in accessibility must mediate an unstable web of organizational and technological infrastructures. This study examines the government mandates, organizational structures, processes, and policies in a research university in Canada aimed at meeting the accessibility needs of its students. Our findings suggest that there is an interplay between informal and formal practices to navigate institutional systems. Technology serves as a mediator in the ''behind-the-scenes'' work that occurs at the intersection of infrastructures. Based on these findings, we provide recommendations to better support accessibility work in universities. We suggest the use of seamful design to support accessibility work, as it aligns with the dynamic nature of disability and distributed networks of accessibility work. We recommend designers foster interdependence to support workers who navigate overlapping infrastructures and breakdowns at the seams.