Defining a Community-driven Research Agenda for Disability and Intimacy in HCI
We are delighted to be hosting a workshop at the 27th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2025), on Wednesday, October 22nd from 9:00 am to 2:00 pm (Central Time) via Zoom.
Intimacy is a complex, multifaceted subject of importance within disability rights movements. Disabled individuals are entitled to the same universal human rights (e.g., marriage, sexual and reproductive self-determination) as everyone else. Assistive measures that support equity in their personal lives remain central to these movements. However, the research community’s relatively narrow focus of what “intimacy” is (i.e., primarily concerned with sex) combined with factors, such as context, cultural sensitivities, power dynamics and complex ethics, has resulted in its limited exploration in HCI Accessibility Research. Among the relatively small body of HCI literature, most works approach disabled intimacies through a primarily deficit-oriented and heteronormative lens. Notably, ASSETS has featured only two papers on this subject in the past 23 years. Moreover, few studies in HCI explore the methodological and ethical considerations of researching disabled intimacies, and even fewer are disability-led and include queer perspectives. In this half-day virtual workshop, we invite engineers, technology design and development researchers, industry practitioners, accessibility advocates, as well as anyone with disabled and/or queer lived experiences to discuss potential avenues to expand research in Disability Intimacy within HCI. Our goal is to better define what this novel research field could look like, facilitate connections between individuals interested in exploring it, and contribute to its overall visibility and expansion
Call For Participation
The Disability Intimacy in HCI Workshop connects researchers working on disability and intimacy in the context of technologies. Together, our aim is to develop a research agenda for disability intimacy in technology research, including potential challenges, theoretical approaches, and relevant questions moving forward.
We invite submissions responding to either one, multiple or all of the following prompts:
- What makes you passionate about disability intimacy in the context of your research practice and beyond?
- What makes you angry about current discourse regarding disabled sexuality in academia and beyond?
- What would you like to see more of in the future; what are you particularly interested in or excited to explore in this context?
Submissions may be made in either of the following formats:
- One A4 page which can include text, drawing, images of artifacts, or any other content.
- One maximum 3-minute-long audio or video file.
Submissions may be made via the submission form and will be reviewed by the organizers for topical fit, with the aim to include a variety of approaches.
Submissions should be accessible PDFs or captioned video/audio. Please contact the organizers in advance if you require assistance generating an accessible PDF or captioning your submissions. Submissions should not be anonymous. Accepted submissions will be made available on the workshop’s private Discord server, to which only the organizers and accepted participants will have access. At least one author of each accepted submission must attend the workshop online, and all participants must register for the workshop.
Submission Deadline: August 15th 2025 (AoE)
Notification of Acceptance: August 21st 2025 (AoE)
ASSETS’25 Early Bird Registration Deadline: August 28th 2025
Contact Organizers: Email queries to Kirk Crawford: kirk4@umbc.edu
Workshop Attendance Costs
Our workshop will be taking place online on the 22nd of October (the week prior to the main ASSETS’25 conference). Participants must register for the workshop in the official ASSETS’25 registration page after acceptance. Participants do not have to register for the full ASSETS’25 conference in order to attend the workshop. The pricing for workshop registration is as follows:
| REGISTRATION TYPE | VIRTUAL WORKSHOP ONLY | VIRTUAL WORKSHOP ADD-ON |
| Student ACM Member | $85 | $68 |
| Student Non-Member | $90 | $72 |
| ACM Member | $100 | $80 |
| Non-Member | $125 | $100 |
Organisers
Ekat Osipova (they/them) is a Ph.D. researcher in the project ACCESSTECH at the TU Wien Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) group. Guided by crip and queer studies, their research explores tech-mediated intimacies from a neurodivergent standpoint. Together with fellow neurodivergent folks, Ekat explores the neuroqueer potentialities of technologies that are pleasurable and create joy.
Jay Rodolitz (she/they) is a Computer Science Ph.D. student at Northeastern University. Their research centers accessibility and usable privacy, exploring the failures of modern regulation and how communities come together to create access and privacy norms that meet their needs.
Kirk Crawford (he/him) is a Ph.D. candidate in Human-Centered Computing at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). His research explores how disabled and neurodivergent LGBTQIA+ individuals and their partners navigate communication in their relationships, with attention to emotional intimacy, the role of technology, and the practices partners develop to support connection and access. He is interested in how future technologies could be designed to reflect these practices and respond to the relationship needs and lived experiences of the partners.
Ana O. Henriques (she/they) is currently a PhD student with ITI/LARSyS, at the University of Lisbon. Ana has focused their research on the intersections of care ethics, feminist HCI, and community-based work while developing a process framework that integrates community-led and feminist for community-based projects.
Kay Kender (any pronouns) is a predoctoral researcher and part of the ACCESSTECH project at the TU Wien HCI group. Their research centers on critical and speculative participatory design approaches to marginalized experiences with and connected to technologies.
Chorong Park (she/her) received her Ph.D. in Technology with a minor in Gerontology from Purdue University in May 2025. Her dissertation—now provisionally patented—focused on designing accessible augmented-reality and AI systems to enhance emotional well-being and autonomy for older adults and people with disabilities. Park’s research weaves together ethical AI, inclusive robotics, and critical disability studies through participatory fieldwork with marginalized older populations. In August 2025, she will join the University of Houston as Assistant Professor of UX/UI Design, where she will continue creating customizable, accessible interfaces that bridge generational and ability divides.
Patricia Piedade (she/her) is a Ph.D. student affiliated with ITI/LARSyS and INESC-ID, at the University of Lisbon. Her research interests lie in accessibility and participatory methodologies, especially at the intersection of the two. Patricia’s current work focuses on how to make public spaces enjoyable for neurodivergent individuals who, like herself, experience feelings of sensory overload and distress within such spaces.
Rachel Wood is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Maryland in College Park. After nearly a decade working in the tech industry as a Senior User Experience Designer, Rachel’s research orients around co-developing accessible technology with individuals who have conditions that affect their cognition (e.g., Alzheimer’s Disease & AD related-dementias, Down Syndrome, Acquired Brain Injury, etc.) and making research methods more inclusive. Her dissertation focuses on improving the accessibility of health data visualizations by co-designing with them individuals with Down Syndrome.
Katta Spiel is an Assistant Professor for ‘Critical Access in Embodied Computing’ at TU Wien. They research marginalized perspectives on embodied computing through a lens of Critical Access. Their work informs design and engineering supporting the development of technologies that account for the diverse realities they operate in. In their interdisciplinary collaborations with disabled, neurodivergent and/or nonbinary peers, they conduct explorations of novel potentials for designs, methodologies and innovative technological artifacts.