Stakeholder & targeted User
Digital equity and inclusion afford increased opportunities and are aimed at all sectors of society. However, there are a variety of obstacles that constitute barriers to digital equity. As a result, existing inequalities are left unsolved and are often reinforced. We partnered with Microsoft Airband and Accessibility teams to analyze a state of digital equity for a specific group of people - people with disabilities.
To understand what the gaps are in the current research concerning people with disabilities and to provide recommendations for how these problems can be addressed in the realm of intersectional invisibility. Our recommendations will help closing the digital gaps in the future by deploying Microsoft’s Airband services.
We started our research by exploring the existing literature review and did some visualizations based on the current research data on broadband usage, availability and disability percentage inside the United States. Although the data might show some correlation, it might not be the case especially since there isn’t much research into the intersectionality.
We discovered that there’s a problem of overgeneralization in the current research on technological accommodations for people with disabilities. The research fails to consider the fundamental distinctions among disabilities and other marginalized demographics.
We used an alternate culture-based approach that views disability as a social construct and focuses on opportunities rather than obstacles. We deployed a user-centered design approach to understand our users, identify the problems, and finally provide recommendations on how to better address the needs for our targeted users.
We first develop several personas to understand our targeted users. Here are the highlighted ones for our personas.
For each of the personas, we developed a scenario - a brief story about that person’s life and how their life would improve if they had proper Internet access.
We learned that intersectionality could play a great role in the future research on people with disabilities. The following would be valuable research questions for the Microsoft Airband and Accessibility team in the future.
We provide Microsoft with recommendations to adapt their research around helping people with disabilities and navigate their specific needs. Our recommendations consist of design iterations for researching the needs of our targeted users and addressing those needs with broadband access and technology adoption.
We would like to conduct participatory design sessions to investigate our research questions with our targeted audience. We would look into public libraries which are using the broadband service provided by the Microsoft Airband team. The participatory design process proposes that people with disabilities and designers design together, empowering people with disabilities to take the lead in design.
Microsoft Airband & Accessibility Team - The participatory design session would help Microsoft fulfill their mission to help everyone with accessing broadband service and help them realize what has to be done to address the digital gap by learning about “intersectional invisibility.”
For People with Disabilities - By having participatory design sessions, our targeted users would have control over their own stories and more voices of “intersectional invisibility” would be heard. After identifying the real needs of people with disabilities, our users would finally benefit from broadband access and technology, furthering digital inclusion through the services provided by Microsoft.
For Family Members of People with Disabilities - By deploying the service which would be finally developed by Microsoft and identifying the real needs through participatory design sessions, the barrier of miscommunication with people with disabilities could be removed. Removing this barrier would help family members of people with disabilities assist people with disabilities with using the Internet and other technologies.
For Society (i.e. school, workplace) - Modern society would look for opportunities rather than obstacles in regards to digital equity for people with disabilities by deploying the solutions that Microsoft would provide. More inclusive spaces would be created if the design started with participatory design sessions.
Stephen Lee
Project Manager
Ali Salahuddin
Data Research & Visualization
Iva Matkovic
UX Design & Research
Yimeng Wang
UX Design & Research