Beyond Visuals: Advancing Inclusion for Blind Professionals Through Information Collaboration

Abstract

The ubiquitous productivity software for information-sharing and collaboration activities has been designed mainly for a sighted organisational environment. This ingrained assumption inevitably leads to normative and habitual information sharing and collaborative practices that accentuate the ‘visual’ nature of information, consequently excluding blind professionals from workplace participation. By acknowledging the interconnectedness between exclusion and inclusion as socially embedded processes and considering the entanglement between visual information representations and visual information practices, this study examines how blind and sighted professionals use digital tools to overcome the challenges of working in a predominantly visual information context. We examine email messages, office documents and PowerPoint slides as they are commonly used information objects in organisations. Our multilevel analysis pays attention to the enabling and constraining roles of representational materialities of information and scrutinises the individual actions of blind professionals, their dyadic interactions with sighted colleagues and the emerging collective actions with other sighted individuals. Drawing on our analysis, we develop a workplace inclusion framework that articulates carefully orchestrated collaborative processes between sighted and blind professionals to overcome constraints imposed by visuals. These processes reveal how ambiguity, imperfection and complexity in information representations trigger the reframing of visuals and deliberate actions of disconfirmation, enquiry and remaking of habitual ways of working with information, thereby evolving collaborative information practices, namely de-visualising, re-visualising, and co-visualising, that shape workplace inclusion.