Understanding, Designing, and Theorizing Collective Access Approaches to Captioning-Mediated Communication

Abstract

For the many people who cannot access audio content, perhaps because they are d/Deaf or hard of hearing, captions are a crucial accessibility tool. While a significant body of work has developed and studied captioning technologies, researchers have traditionally only considered d/Deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) people as captioning users. Yet, communication is inherently interactive, and Deaf and disabled scholars and activists increasingly emphasize that accessibility ought to be a group-level, not individual, concern. Treating DHH people as the sole users of captioning places all of the work of ensuring communication access on the group that faces access barriers. Further, when captioning tools are not designed to also engage conversation partners, a number of avenues to make conversation more accessible cannot be considered. In my dissertation I identify the impact of conversation partners on captioning use and design collective communication access approaches, reimagining how we conceptualize communication access. My dissertation research uses a range of qualitative, theoretical, and design methods to understand the context that shapes caption use and to envision collective access technologies. I begin by outlining a theoretical framework for collective communication access, drawing from disability studies, Deaf studies, disability justice, and communication studies. I then identify factors that shape DHH people's experiences of real-time captioning in small groups and identify the potential for and interest in group captioning tools. Via a codesign study with mixed hearing ability groups, I identify promising practical directions for the design of collective access captioning tools. I then explore the role of contextual factors and collective access in a different form of captioning -- user-generated captions on TikTok. Finally. I review the past decade of captioning literature through a collective communication access lens, identifying that designing for the group, grounded in communication context, is a novel but promising approach to creating captioning technologies. My dissertation makes empirical, theoretical, and design contributions, envisioning and grappling with the complexities of designing communication access technologies anchored in Deaf and disability scholarship and activism. I propose a future of accessibility practice that uses technology to guide nondisabled people toward more accessible norms and builds tools that can better match the ways they are used in practice.