October 21st | Porto | Virtual

Call for Participation

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)

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.

Organizers