Paper Alert: Experiencing Deaf Tech

Robin Angelini, Katta Spiel and Maartje De Meulder just published a paper on Deaf Technology! Curious what it’s all about? We’ve got a quick overview for you in these slides!

👉 Their research dives into how current tech often requires deaf users to adapt, rather than being designed with their needs in mind. 💡 

👉 What if technology was specifically created with deaf perspectives as a priority? This paper explores that idea through a case study called Deaf Watch — a concept imagined by deaf participants to better serve their everyday experiences.

Plus, Robin explains the paper’s main points in International Sign (IS).

ACCESSTECH @ ÖGGF 2024

Several members of the ACCESSTECH team participated in the 10th conference of the Gender Studies Association Austria (ÖGGF) which took place in Graz, 18-20 September 2024. The transdisciplinary conference focussed on the theme of “Humans – Machines – Environments” and addressed critical questions around the roles of gender in technology, the interaction between humans and machines, and biases in artificial intelligence.

ACCESSTECH contributed two talks: On Thursday, Katta Spiel talked about “Digitalisiertes Schlangenöl: Automatisierte Ansätze in der Gendermedizin” (Digitized Snake Oil: Automated Approaches in Gender Medicine).

Katta Spiel talking in front of an audience. Title slide is shown in the background.

On Friday, Janis Lena Meißner and Ekat Osipova shared reflections on “The Risk of Materialized Cultural Reproduction in and through Online 3D-Model Databases” and presented work they have conducted together with Kay Kender and Naemi Luckner.

Janis Meißner stands on the left and talks in front of an audience. Ekat Osipova stands on the right. A slide is shown in the background listing identified issues.

Open doors with ‘die Maus’

Last week, we had special visitors: ‚die Maus‘ came for a visit along many small and ‘big’ children. 
Under the theme ‘Technology for an inclusive future’, we set up four interactive stations as part of #TürenAufMitDerMaus2024, where young and old could playfully 

  • explore 3D printing, 
  • immerse themselves in Austrian sign language,
  • learn about how circuits and LEDs work, and
  • reflect on what solidarity actually means.
Children, a mother and researchers at the four stations. 3D printed mice and coins, glowing mouse hand puppets are made, a story is read aloud, and learning sign language is prepared.
Impressions from the “ZusammenTun” (collaborating) with the Maus.

Many thanks to our curious visitors, who participated wonderfully and with great interest at each station.
We look forward to seeing you again next year!

More information about the event can be found on the ‘Türen auf mit der Maus’ Website

You can also find further impressions on our new Instagram channel.

Dazzling contributions at MuC24

ACCESSTECH had a strong presence at this year’s „Mensch und Computer“ (MuC) in Karlsruhe, Germany. Founded in 2001, the MuC conference is the largest conference series on human-computer interaction in Europe.


Almost the entire ACCESSTECH team was on site to present our work and goals in various workshops, paper presentations and panel discussions to an interested audience of experts.


Our first contribution from Kay and Janis was to co-organise and run the workshop Can’t Touch This? Is This Touch? It’s So Fluffy I’m Gonna Die! — Material and Tangible Research Methods in HCI‘. Together, they created a zine with the catchy name ‘Touchy Feely’, which was duplicated in an overnight action and published directly at the conference the next day. We announced the workshops here on this website in April.

A zine double page with drawings and text.
Scribbles of the Zine centering quotes around a human figurine.


On the second day, Katta gave a prominent keynote speech in the workshop ‘Bedürfnisse sind unterschiedlich und verändern sich, Methoden auch? Umdenken bei Forschungsmethoden’ and used their own practical examples to show how research with the mindset of “being consciously non-helpful” can lead to a fundamental understanding and radical implementation of access and participation.

Box of zines and stickers.

On the third day, our core values of participation and solidarity were again highlighted in the paper presentation entitled ‘Von Partizipation zu Solidarität: Eine Fallstudie zur Zugänglichkeit von Makerspaces aus Gehörloser und Hörender Perspektive’ by Oliver and Katta.

Oliver and Katta presenting a talk.  A slide in the background reads Access/Zugang.


Oliver then took part in a panel discussion on the topic of ‘The State of (In)Accessibility in Academia’ and used their own experiences to argue that the removal of barriers is a continuous process and can only be successful if it is actively driven forward by all parties involved (with and without disabilities).
With these comprehensive contributions and a dazzling appearance (see photo below), we have evidently succeeded in giving visibility and publicity to our concerns among a (partly somewhat traditional) audience.

Panel discussion with five people and one interpreter in the back.


All in all, it was a very successful conference which, in addition to the professional aspects, also offered an excellent supporting programme with a festival atmosphere and cultural evening events in an impressive setting. We would like to thank everyone involved in the organisation and implementation and congratulate them on a fabulous MuC24!

Five team members showing of their shirts with logos on the back in front of the MuC Logo.
Five team members showing of their shirts with logos on the back in front of the MuC Logo.

First ACCESSTECH paper out: “Cyber toy stories: The broken promises and broken parts of interactive sex toys” 

Videos show content in International Sign (left) and Austrian Sign Language (right).

Teledildonics are remote-controllable sex toys that transmit touch in real-time via vibrational patterns between two (or more) users. Inspired by sci-fi narratives, they aim at enabling sex at physical distance. The ability to combine teledildonics with virtual reality pornography further promises endless possibilities for sexual interactions.  

To investigate how this idea is realized in practice, we took a deep dive into one Dutch teledildonics company, KIIROO

The results

KIIROO portrays an imminent technologized utopia by promising that their products will revolutionize sexual relationships and improve the health and safety of their customers. However, while they present their claims as established facts, they do so without necessarily providing the required proof to back these up. 

Further, despite claiming that their products are for everyone KIIROO’s presentations and design of their teledildonics rienforce cis-hetero-normative concepts of sex, intimacy, and relationships. Thereby a range of groups (such as queer and disabled people) are marginalized, ignored and effectively excluded. 

Contrary to the company’s promises, we show how such enactments potentially result in a dystopia characterized by security nightmares around intimacies and dire consequences for mental and physical health, safety, and consensual sexual interactions.

The point

Design and marketing of a product cannot be separated. If we actually want to foster inclusivity, we also need to change the cyber toy stories we tell about intimate technologies. 

You can find the full paper at the journal homepage.

ACCESSTECH @ DIS 2024

Videos show content in International Sign (left) and Austrian Sign Language (right).

ACCESSTECH was represented at the conference for Designing Interactive Systems, where members of the team co-organised a workshop on techniques for queering data and AI systems.

Pictures © Tommaso Armstrong

Each participant brought one or more queering techniques along to discuss in the workshop — our examples, destruction and non-use, were part of a zine we created.

Closeup of the print version and stickers of the 'We want you to stop using AI' zine.  It has flowers and trees and tech symbols enmesched on it, and is a zine by Ekat Osipova and Kay Kender.

We have also made a neat set of stickers for one of our queering techniques!

Inspired by the workshop to make trouble, we spent the conference engaging in mild scholarly vandalism, getting an overview of the design scene in HCI, and scheming about future work with fellow troublemakers.

BÄM!

In mid-May the AccessTech core team was finally complete and met for a retreat in beautiful Carinthia, near Lake Ossiach, from May 23rd to May 24th.

Selfie with project members smiling.  From left front to right: Felix sitting in a wheelchair, Ekat wearing a dashing shirt, Katta posing, Robin kneeling down smiling, Kay kneeling down squinting, Katharina leaning forward and smiling, Lou grinning into the camera and Janis holding the camera.

We used those two days to fully concentrate on how to approach our big project, what we want to achieve within its different subtopics and what we need to do so. Along the way we also got to know each other better as a team with our strengths as well as weaknesses and defined our guiding principle for the project:

Everybody is talking about access, accessibility and equality, but to really give a sense of what access actually means, we decided to use this project to make a little ‘BAM!’ to increase crip (self-)awareness in this world!

Sidenote: Breaks are important! In between, we also took enough time to clear our heads again and how could a project better kick off than with a full rainbow…

Some project members and interpreters looking over Lake Ossiach with a rainbow spanning both sides of the lake.

Workshop on “Material and Tangible Research Methods in HCI”

Videos show content in International Sign (left) and Austrian Sign Language (right).

We are pleased to announce that members of the ACCESSTECH team are co-organising a one-day workshop on “Material and Tangible Research Methods in HCI” at the “Mensch und Computer 2024” (MuC) conference. We will use this opportunity to reflect collectively with other researchers on the capacities of materials to serve as multifunctional resources that can serve as data, methods, processes, and outcomes of research projects. In particular, we are keen to explore how materials help us to convey nuanced meanings and make abstract concepts more “graspable” and thereby more accessible to a wider audience.

Here are some of the questions that we are interested to hear other researchers’ thoughts about:

  • What objects have (had) an impact on your research? What role did their materiality play in this? Examples: a specific book, your first 3D print, an artifact from one of your earlier projects, …
  • What material is/was important in your research, and why? Examples: building bricks in pleasing colors, a box of crafting materials that feel just right in your hands, a deck of cards that helps your research partners think about the topic at hand, …
  • Which objects or materials do you treasure or care a lot about in a work context, and why? Examples: souvenirs from a specific person, time or place, inspirational works by other people, the perfect fit to your target group’s needs and preferences.
  • How does material/how do objects relate to you and your work? Example: a space you have conducted research in, a recording device you use during your interviews, a library where you spent countless hours researching, writing, thinking, …

Making things to find a shared critical language

In my own work, I have spent much time making/crafting together with different groups of people: sitting together in a knitting circle creating pieces for an activist yarnboming installation; joining glass artists and interaction designers in a workshop to experiment how to make glass conductive; designing a brochure for a Men’s Shed and editing it together with its members; 3D-printing with disabled makers to fabricate their own ideas. In all these situations, our creative engagement with digital or physical materials has helped us to find a shared language for articulating complex thoughts and discussing intricate issues.

Two instances of 3D-printed “wheelchair golfballs” that were produced in the “Empowering Hacks” project to critique the injust pricing policy of assitive products.

Here is a concrete example from the “Empowering Hacks” project: 3D-printed “wheelchair golfballs”. They are rather simple in their design, but they help me to tell a far greater story around the socioeconomic injustice that people with disabilities face on a daily basis and the empowering capacity that research projects can have if they give people with disabilities the opportunity to switch their role from users to designers. The creators of the “wheelchair golfball” are Nick and Norman, two men with disabilities who are frustrated with the expensive price range of assistive gadgets. Wheelchair golfballs are a typical example for this. They are a popular modification of the joystick shape on the control panel of power wheelchairs. The original design consists of an actual golf ball with a hole drilled into it so that it can be put over the joystick’s metal rod. Home-produced wheelchair golf balls are sold online for surprisingly steep prices (roughly 10-15 times the price of a single golfball). “Empowering Hacks” hence aimed “to produce disabled tools at a cheaper rate but with a more customisable outcome” (in the words of my participants) and so we collaborated on designing, modelling and 3D-printing “wheelchair golfballs” in different shapes, forms and colours. Over time, Nick and Norman became known for their designs and even started to work on commissions – such as the “wheelchair golfball” pictured on the right that is produced in the magpie design of the Newcastle United soccer team. In the research project, this also signified the moment as my collaborators fully embraced their new roles as makers.

Call for Participation

If you are considering attending MuC 2024 and have your own story to share about the role of materials in your research, please consider participating in our workshop. It will take place on Sunday, September 1st, in Karlsruhe and we have planned a full-day in-person hands-on program structured around co-creating a zine with participants. If you are interested, please refer to the call for participation and submit a zine page until July 16, 2024 (AoE).

ACCESSTECH is starting out

Videos show content in International Sign (left) and Austrian Sign Language (right).

As the team assembles, we are happy to present this web page to you now. It will serve as an invitation and communication platform for our results as well as an archive of our activities. Please feel free to reach out with your feedback at any time! Also let us know if you’re interested in collaborating with us. You do not have to be an academic!