October 21st | Porto | Virtual

Call for Participation

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About the Workshop

Designing accessible technologies and services plays a vital role in facilitating social and civic inclusion for people with diverse abilities; yet inclusion is equally vital to creating them. The methods through which research and design are conducted should themselves be inclusive, so that people with diverse abilities can participate as co-designers and co-owners of the work. Nevertheless, researchers working across ability-diverse populations often find themselves without a clear starting point. Existing guidelines are scarce and often difficult to adapt to specific contexts and communities. Translating resources into practice requires tailored vocabularies and procedures that are rarely documented or shared. Our workshop brings together researchers and practitioners working with people with diverse abilities to begin mapping the landscape of inclusive methodological approaches. Our goal is to surface what people are already doing including adaptations, workarounds, and community-specific practices that rarely make it into publications. The outcome will be a shared resource that includes case studies and approaches that can be used as inspirational starting points that researchers can adapt to their own contexts and communities.

Date: October 21st, 2026

Format: Virtual

Length: 4 hours

• First block: 8:00 – 10:00 (UTC)

• Second block: 14:00 – 16:00 (UTC)

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Workshop Programme:

Session 1: Learning from experience

When: 21st October, 10:00 to 12:00 CEST (UTC+2)

Goal: Share experiences of working with people with diverse abilities, and capture the tacit knowledge in them.

Session 1 schedule

1.    10:00 to 10:30: Welcome and introductions

2.    10:30 to 11:10: Fireside chat with experts

3.    11:10 to 11:20: Break

4.    11:20 to 11:50: Discussion in breakout rooms

5.    11:50 to 12:00: Back together: sharing and next steps

Session 1 fireside chat

Moderator: MinYoung Yoo (he / him) moderates the chat. Min recently completed his Ph.D. (Aug. 2026) in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology (SIAT) at Simon Fraser University (SFU) in Vancouver, Canada, at the Homeware Lab. His research explores how interactive technologies can support and co-create blind people’s reminiscence experiences, supporting the situated lived experiences of marginalized groups and surfacing alternative perspectives often overlooked in design.

The experts:

Seray Ibrahim is a Lecturer within the Faculty of Nursing, Midwifery & Palliative Care at King’s College London. She works with disabled children and young people who communicate in many different ways, including with AAC (augmentative and alternative communication), and looks at how to include them in design.

Maartje De Meulder is a Deaf senior researcher at HU University of Applied Sciences Utrecht, the Netherlands. She works in Deaf Studies and applied linguistics. She studies how interpreters, institutions, and technologies, including AI sign language technologies, shape communication and access.

Arthur Theil is a Lecturer in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) within the College of Computing at Birmingham City University, where he teaches HCI, user experience design, and accessibility to undergraduate and postgraduate students.  He works on accessible technology with deafblind and deaf people, including haptic (touch-based) communication.

Session 1 breakout room discussion: Capturing tacit knowledge

We share stories from our own work. Then we try to capture the tacit knowledge in them: things we know from experience, but that are rarely written down.

Session 2: Towards a manifesto of practice

When: 21st October 2026, 16:00 to 18:00 CEST (UTC+2)

Goal: Share experiences and bring our learnings together into shared words and principles. Start writing a manifesto of practice together.

Session 2 schedule

1.    16:00 to 16:20: Welcome and introductions of new participants

2.    16:20 to 17:00: Fireside chat with experts

3.    17:00 to 17:10: Break

4.    17:10 to 17:40: Discussion in breakout rooms

5.    17:40 to 18:00: Back together: sharing and next steps

Session 2 fireside chat

MinYoung Yoo moderates the chat.

The experts:

Stefania Serafin is a professor at the Technical University of Denmark and affiliated researcher at Copenhagen Hearing and Balance Center, Rigshospitalet. Her research lies at the intersection of sonic interaction design, extended reality, multisensory design and health tech, with a strong focus on using sound as a primary modality for interaction rather than a secondary enhancement.

Giulia Barbareschi is a Professor of Inclusive Technology and Collective Engagement at the Research Center Trustworthy Data Science and Security (UA Ruhr) and the Fakultät für Informatik der Universität Duisburg-Essen. Her research focuses on designing, developing, and evaluating technology that addresses the needs and priorities of disabled individuals and other marginalized users in both the Global South and Global North to ensure more equitable access to opportunities.

Katta Spiel is an Assistant Professor of Critical Access in Embodied Computing at TU Wien (Vienna University of Technology), Austria. Katta’s work looks at how technology can better support neurodivergent people, using critical and participatory approaches.

Session 2 breakout room discussion: Bringing it together

In the earlier session we captured tacit knowledge of individual experiences, and now we bring them together. We look for what is common, collect the words we use, and agree on principles distilled in the form of a manifesto:  a short list of beliefs and promises.

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Workshop Themes

Theme 1: Theories

A growing body of theoretical work informs how researchers think about inclusive design with people with diverse abilities. These theories are often grounded in fundamental assumptions which may map differently onto shared core terminology. Moreover, differences in how frameworks are interpreted lead to inconsistencies in their application; theories developed in one context do not always translate to another, and researchers working with different populations (e.g., older adults, people with cognitive impairments, autistic individuals, those with diverse communication needs) often find themselves adapting, combining, or departing from existing frameworks in ways that are rarely made explicit.

This theme invites participants to reflect on the theoretical foundations that inform their work. We also invite discussion on the terms which anchor these theories to establish a common vocabulary both for the purposes of this session and to guide future work.

Theme 2: Practice

Even when researchers are guided by strong theoretical commitments, translating inclusive values into practice remains genuinely difficult and might look very different in reality. Beyond academic publications, there is a broader lack of shared knowledge about how to work with ability-diverse communities, and ad-hoc adjustments — to materials, language, activities, and relationships — are rarely documented in ways that others can learn from.

This theme focuses on what inclusive methodological practice actually looks like on the ground; how researchers structure their processes, how they adapt when things do not go as planned, and how they navigate the tensions between inclusive ideals and the constraints of real research contexts. We are particularly interested in the gap between what is labelled participatory or co-design and what genuinely inclusive collaboration looks like in practice, and in the strategies researchers have developed to close that gap, whether through adapted facilitation techniques, accessible materials, community-embedded approaches, or sustained long-term engagement with participants.

Theme 3: Outcomes

Research with ability-diverse communities produces a wide range of outcomes that extend well beyond the academic publications through which they are typically shared. Design artefacts, toolkits, training materials, community resources, and relationships built over time are all products of this work, yet they are rarely recognised or valued within conventional research dissemination frameworks.

This theme opens up questions around how outcomes are defined, shared, and attributed in inclusive research. Alternative research outcomes offer one response to this, acknowledging the diverse forms that research contributions can take. Alongside this, questions of co-ownership and authorship are increasingly pressing. When communities and participants contribute substantively to the design and direction of research, what does it mean to share credit equitably? We invite participants to reflect on how they currently document and disseminate their work, what has been lost or left behind in that process, and how the field might develop more inclusive and representative ways of recognising the full range of contributions that research with ability-diverse communities produces.

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Organizers