Early Indicators of the Effect of the Global Shift to Remote Work on People with Disabilities

ABSTRACT

Interviews of 25 people with disabilities who telework that were conducted during the first month of the COVID-19 pandemic response in the U.S. provided an early indicator of how they were affected by the abrupt shift to remote work. The participants included people with a range of disabilities that regularly teleworked before the pandemic. The interviews identified how having everyone work remotely leveled the playing field in some ways, for example, by giving everyone the remote work experience, making social activities more explicit and inclusive, and affording a frontal video view of every participant, making it easier to lip read. The comments also identified ways that the workplace could be more inclusive by further embracing telework, even after the pandemic response. While people with disabilities may have embraced teleworking to make their work more accessible, their experiences can help identify design implications for making a future remote work experience more inclusive.

Keywords

accessibility, telework, computer-medicated communication, collaboration technology

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John C. Tang
Microsoft Research
johntang@microsoft.com

John C. Tang is a Principal Researcher in the Ability group at Microsoft Research where he designs and studies new tools to enable people of all abilities to connect with other people over distance. John’s approach combines understanding users’ needs through social science methods with designing and prototyping new technologies. He was named to the ACM SIGCHI Academy in 2014. Before joining Microsoft, John worked at IBM Research Almaden, Sun Microsystems, and Xerox PARC, and received his Ph.D.

New Future of Work 2020, August 3–5, 2020
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