“It doesn’t win you friends”: Understanding accessibility in collaborative writing for people with vision impairments

Collaborative writing tools have become ubiquitous in today’s world and are used widely in many professional organizations and academic settings. Yet, we know little about how ability-diverse teams, such as those involving people with and without vision impairments, make use of collaborative writing tools. We report on interviews with 20 academics and professionals who are blind or visually impaired and perform collaborative writing with sighted colleagues. Our findings reveal that people with vision impairments perform collaborative writing activities through four interconnected processes, which include learning an ecosystem of (in)accessible tools, adapting to complexities of collaborative features, balancing the cost and benefit of accessibility, and navigating power dynamics within organizations. We discuss how our analysis contributes to theories of accessibility in collaboration and offers practical insights for future collaborative system design.