Hello! Today, I’ll be speaking about our CSCW paper, The Invisible Labor of Access in Academic Writing Practices: A Case Analysis with Dyslexic Adults. My name is Emily Wang, and I am an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Oberlin College. My co-author is Anne Marie Piper, who is an Associate Professor of Informatics at the University of California at Irvine. In this presentation, I am inviting us to explore the accessibility of writing tools.

This includes spell checkers, predictive text, autocomplete, and more applications throughout our everyday lives. Many of us have benefited from these tools catching typing errors that we would not have noticed otherwise… But we also frequently see these tools completely miss the mark, and turn our writing into something different than we intended.
Many of us have likely experienced situations similar to these screenshots, with “second” being changed to “decade” on the left, and “Windex” being changed to “wonder” on the right, where an algorithm inadvertently replaced the word with something completely different.

The problem here is that outside of chat speak, the limitations of these tools can have major consequences for minoritized writers who currently rely on them for editing help. This problem was brought to my attention by my academic colleagues with dyslexia. Some of you may already know about dyslexia and different experiences of neurodiversity. Dyslexia is referred to as a learning disability that impacts how the brain processes language, leading to additional challenges with reading, writing, and spelling.

At least 15% of the population experiences some form of learning disabilities, with dyslexia being the most common experience within that umbrella. To bring all those threads together, working with writing tools and disabled professionals is important for us as CSCW researchers and practitioners, because written communication is central to our everyday lives and careers. While today my examples are focusing on higher education contexts, writing tool interactions apply broadly whether you’re writing for academia, industry, or other audiences.

The motivation here is that building writing tools with disabled people in mind is crucial for making the working world more inclusive. As a field, we don’t know much yet about how effective writing tools are in practice for people with learning disabilities like dyslexia.
Therefore, one of our research questions was: How do dyslexic adults negotiate writing experiences with technologies, collaborators, and audiences across social contexts? I’ll briefly describe the qualitative methods we used. The study included interviews, observations, and editing think-alouds with 11 dyslexic professionals in different fields. The topics in the dataset included challenges and workarounds in writing processes, workflows across tools, such as word processors, spell checkers, and search engines, as well as how writing experiences differ across social contexts.

The handful of findings I’ll present here will show how dyslexic adults are skillfully navigating a combination of technical, social, and institutional factors that impact accessibility. The first example is from Lisa, who is a dyslexic biology PhD student. She explains that “for biology, there’s just so many words that aren’t English, and Grammarly is for English.” Grammarly is a popular spell-checking application and third-party extension. One technological issue Lisa repeatedly runs into is that tools like Grammarly autocorrect domain-specific words to standard English words. For example, “planaria,” which is a type of flatworm, was autocorrected to “planning” throughout her biology reports.

This phenomenon is not unique to dyslexic writers, but this issue has a disproportionate negative impact on them, because they are less likely to notice that this happens due to their experiences of dyslexia and how that affects reading.

My second example is from Alex, a dyslexic anthropologist, who critiques the visual design of the spell check interfaces many of us may take for granted. For example, when Alex was walking me through his experience with spell check, he explained that even when spell check finds the error and suggest the proper correction, there’s an additional barrier for dyslexic writers to figure out which word they actually want from the list. On this slide, I’ve included a screenshot of a spell checker dialog with the suggestions of “referred, refereed, refeed, referend, and revered,” and Alex said, “All of these options look the same to me.” So, the technology issue here is that front-end user interfaces are not legible to dyslexic writers.

Because the tools keep having those recurring issues, dyslexic writers figure out workarounds to overcome them in the meantime. One workaround is copy-pasting words from many different browser tabs, research papers, and lecture slides that are going to have the correct spelling. As Alex explained, “I always have every reference I’m working with open, and then copying specific words or phrases to make sure I’ve got the orthography right.” While this may seem mundane because all of us Google things to double check them, it’s not just every once in a while for Alex. It takes up substantial time and attention while he’s editing most of his sentences.

Another workaround dyslexic writers use is asking personal networks for editing help. Mason is a dyslexic math and economics undergraduate major, and says, “If you have learning disabilities, the strongest asset you have is people. I ask my friends to proofread everything.” This reveals the relational dimensions and strategies that dyslexic writers use, in addition to the technology workarounds. Again, it’s not just once in a while.

Dyslexic writers are spending social capital to participate. This becomes unsustainable as documents become more specialized throughout career advancement. Finally, dyslexic writers shared their experiences navigating societal expectations for writing.

They mentioned the criticisms they have repeatedly received in anonymized peer review related to experiences of dyslexia. Our participants say better tools and services are needed because “little errors usually make people have judgments about the totality of the work.” Kyle, who is a learning sciences PhD candidate, explains that he “will try to remove as many of the little errors that I’m so bad at because I want people to treat my work with the respect I think it’s worth.” Here, Kyle is pointing to the internalized ableist expectations many of us may have about academics’ abilities to produce error-free writing.

This points to some broader institutional problems. Without the availability of copy editing as a standard accommodation, reviewers frequently misconstrue dyslexic writers’ misspellings as laziness and misjudge them as less capable. In the last two slides of the presentation, I’ll discuss the conceptual and practical contributions of this work. Our findings illustrate how simultaneously, technical, social and cultural factors impact accessibility in the writing process. One implication is that current tools do not meet users’ needs for domain-specific writing. In the meantime, dyslexic writers skillfully manage with workarounds that involve different tools and personal networks.

This creativity is an important asset for us to recognize and can inform the design of more inclusive systems. In the Discussion, I build on CSCW theory from Star and Strauss to explain how this is an instance of invisible work.

While these workarounds are effective one time solutions, the additional time and resource burden for every written product is in itself a barrier to long term participation and inclusion. To improve accessibility, we must understand and support the labor of access through sociotechnical means. We recommend technological changes, which includes improving transparency and customization in writing tools. At the institutional level, we recommend designing disability-positive writing services. We also recommend organizational changes, such as rethinking peer review criteria, practices, and platforms.
Thank you for watching this presentation. I want to thank my committee members, colleagues, labs, and institutions who supported this work along the way. Please read the paper for more details and I look forward to questions.

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