Literature in EMCA has studied how people with disabilities use computational technologies spanning mobile phones, or robots to accomplish different tasks (Nielsen et al., 2024; Due, 2023). Video ethnography and the transcription of gaze, talk, and gestures are valuable to understand how people’s diverse interactions with technology and others cannot be anticipated but studied in situ. Recording and transcribing videos of these interactions facilitates a granular analysis of what people and technologies accomplish as an assemblage of distributed agents (Due, 2024). Building on these studies we investigate how accessibility, understood as a practice (Muñoz, 2023) not only a quality of designed things, emerges as a distributed accomplishment in the interaction between people and technology. Drawing on video ethnographic data with a blind participant and wheelchair user respectively, we analyse how accessibility is accomplished in specific work situations. As such we focus on analyzing in detail how participants, their colleagues, and access technologies, as an assemblage, create different forms of accessibility in situ. The analysis informs EMCA studies of technology use centering people with disabilities in workplace studies, while also grounding a theoretical discussion in science and technology studies and EMCA on the concept of accessibility as a frictional and ongoing practice (Hamraie & Fritsch, 2019) embedded in situated uses of technology (Oudshoorn & Pinch, 2003) and sociomaterial interactions.

When ethnographic and ethnomethodological data is collected at different workplaces across Europe with a focus on people with disabilities, the question arises of how we as researchers approach and understand interactions in this context. In this contribution, we offer a theoretical exploration of interactional asymmetries that arise in the context of workplace interaction between sighted and blind people. We will discuss implications of these asymmetric interactions from two perspectives.
The first perspective deals with asymmetries in access to and sharing of multimodal or linguistic resources (Hirvonen & Schmitt, 2018; Lilja, 2014). The second perspective deals with asymmetries inherent in workplace interactions: Asymmetry may be found in interactions between professionals and lay people (Drew & Heritage, 1992), in different distributions of knowledge amongst colleagues (Drew & Heritage, 1992), or may lead to team competence (Hirvonen, 2024).
While asymmetry is prevalent in all social interaction (Enfield, 2011), these interrelated approaches underline the need for an in situ perspective on analysing meaning-making processes as “Sinnherstellung” (Schütz, 1932), when meaning is understood as jointly constructed and situationally evolving (Deppermann & De Stefani, 2024, p. 4). Drawing on examples from video data of workplace interaction between blind and sighted people, we will present the analysis of three situations in which these different dimensions of asymmetries are made relevant by the participants themselves. Through these cases, we will discuss how participants collaboratively negotiate and share meaning despite or through asymmetries.

Among studies who contributed to social models of disability, research in Ethnomethodological Conversation Analysis shows, through detailed analyses of naturally occurring data, the way people with physical, cognitive and/or linguistic impairments do de facto experience disability in social interaction (Antaki & Wilkinson, 2012; Wilkinson et al., 2020). Indeed, rather than identifying and treating disability with assumed cognitive or physical states, this perspective focuses on participants’ interactional practices, as they act and perform actions with their bodies, in specific contextual and material configurations, and in cooperation with their interlocutors (see Goodwin 1995; 2003 on aphasia; Antaki et al., 2017 on learning disabilities; Maynard & Turowetz, 2017 on autism; Due, 2024 on blindness). In this paper, we expand on this line of research and present some preliminary observations on a large corpus of data which is being collected within the framework of a Horizon European project (NewWorkTech, 2024-2027), which investigates how participants with different (dis)abilities interact and accomplish tasks in workplace settings while making use of different technologies. The populations included in the research are persons diagnosed with physical and/or cognitive impairments: blind people, wheelchair users, people with down syndrome and neurodiverse persons. The study is framed within Multimodal Conversation Analysis and is based on detailed transcripts of participants’ verbal and multimodal conduct. Though the analysis of selected sequences of interaction, we discuss etic and normo-centric perspectives on dis-ability and show instead if and how participants themselves, during their working activities and through their use of technologies, practically and interactively orient to dis-ability as such.

REFERENCES

Antaki, C., R. Wilkinson (2012). Conversation Analysis and the Study of Atypical Populations. In Sidnell J., Stivers T., The Handbook of Conversation Analysis. Blackwell.
Antaki, C., Crompton, R. J., Walton, C., Finlay, W.M.L. (2017). How adults with a profound intellectual disability engage others in interaction. Sociology of Health & Illness, 39 (4), 495-649.
Due, B. L. (Eds.) (2024). The Practical Accomplishment of Everyday Activities Without Sight. Routledge.
Goodwin, C. (1995). Co-Constructing Meaning in Conversations with an Aphasic Man. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 28, 3, 233-260.
Goodwin, C. (Eds.) (2003). Conversation and brain Damage. OUP.
Maynard D. W., Turowetz J. (2017). Doing Testing: How Concrete Competence can Facilitate or Inhibit Performances of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder, Qualitative Sociology, vol. 40, 467–491.
Wilkinson R., J. P. Rae, & G. Rasmussen (Eds.), (2020). Atypical interaction: The impact of communicative impairments within everyday talk. Palgrave.

Interactional competence refers to the ability to formulate social actions in ways that are recognizable and acceptable by others (Pekarek Doehler, 2019). This ability rests on the capacity to use and coordinate multimodal resources both locally, in situated interaction for specific communicative needs, and more generally, when entering into new social engagements (Hellermann et al. 2019). The development of interactional competences is part of socialization processes evidenced in the everyday practices at various workplaces.

In professional or institutional interaction, competence can denote the skilful use of communication and action as devices for activity accomplishment, whereby skilfulness is to be understood in concrete, situational terms rather than as an abstract property residing in the mind (Hirvonen, 2024). In this presentation, we study competences in visually laden workplace interaction.

The data come from interaction training in Finland whose aim is to help companies and organisations to improve interactional practices in online meetings. Four deaf coaches piloted the training method with seven individual clients. In this presentation, we present an analysis of ethnographic data from the training, including among others video recordings of the training sessions between deaf signers and hearing clients, who do not know sign language. The data are analysed in the framework of practice theory (e.g., Schatzki, 2002) and multimodal interaction analysis (e.g., Mondada, 2018). The feedback by the clients reports an improved awareness to enhance interaction in online meetings, such as the use of gaze for coordinating attention and managing interaction in the overlapping physical and digital spaces.