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To cite this work: Lee, C. (2025). Digital disability dialogues: What does it mean to hold dialogue with each other in the digital “post”-COVID age? Disability Dialogues. 91ֱ��: iHuman, University of 91ֱ��. 

Christina Lee (she/her) is a Research Associate for Knowledge Exchange for the Disability Matters project at the University of 91ֱ��. She is also an Honorary Research Fellow at University College London. She completed her PhD in English and Medical Humanities at King’s College London in 2023. Her research interests include narratives of illness and healing, care, disability studies, and the medical humanities. This piece of writing emerged as a part of an ongoing conversation between three Research Associates based at iHuman who meet regularly to discuss issues of access and ableism in academia.

While the mainstreaming of virtual conferencing since 2020 has improved access to meetings for many disabled people, this shift was primarily driven by necessity during the pandemic lockdowns, convenience, and cost reduction rather than a commitment to accessibility. This means that meetings remain governed by a normative ableist logic that invisibilises and minimises the needs of disabled bodyminds. Given that participants across the organisation or community often join from locations and time zones, a key challenge to organising events like town hall meetings is that it is often difficult to get everyone “in the room”. Synchronous meetings allow attendees to engage in real-time and interact spontaneously, but the limitation of time means that not everyone will have the opportunity to voice their opinions. This also makes town hall meetings inaccessible to those who require longer breaks and more time to process the information. Smaller workshops and breakout sessions may help by creating more intimate spaces where attendees can talk to each other individually. However, these are frequently centrally managed by the hosts and the absence of automatic captioning in breakout rooms on some platforms like Zoom make them inaccessible to D/deaf and hearing impaired participants.

There is a common tendency to assume that online conferencing technology will automatically make events accessible. This reliance on technology as quick fixes (e.g. a new speech recognition software, AI-generated alt text for images) is expressive of the growing disability hackivist culture that seeks to use technology to fix disability by enhancing disabled bodies and minds (Yergeau, 2014). Indeed, the premise for favouring online meetings as more accessible relies on the implicit assumption that there is sufficient access to internet and digital literacy to enable online participation in the first place. Such pre-requisite conditions systematically exclude proportions of the global south that have limited and unstable access to the Internet (Ragnedda & Gladkova, 2020).

These normalising technologies are also racialising and imperialistic. Automatic captioning is not only frequently inaccurate but also racially discriminatory in the way accented, non-native or non-standard English speakers’ words are distorted and misheard (Martin & Wright, 2023). Even when captioning is available, the inaccuracy and racial biases of automatic captioning in their failure to accurately capture accented English compel us to attend to the ways assistive technologies function as normalising technologies that legitimate only certain forms of speech as the ‘right’ kind of speech.

Zoom meetings can actually make events more inaccessible to some disabled people. The shift to online working and learning during COVID lockdown exposed deeply entrenched class and technological divides. Those from socioeconomic disadvantaged backgrounds have restricted access to digital devices and do not have the privilege of private quiet spaces at home where they can attend meetings without disturbance (Coleman, 2021). The noise and visual stimuli at online meetings can also cause sensory overload and immense stress to some neurodivergent people (Freeman Loftis, 2021).

So as we come to think about access, it’s crucial that we are not treating access solely as a technical problem. Instead, we must continuously engage in dialogue about the access frictions/access as friction that emerge from these meetings and experiment with collaborative, creative ways of being together without giving up or leaving anyone behind (Mingus, 2010).

 References

Coleman, T. (2021). Digital divide in UK education during COVID-19 pandemic: Literature review.

Freeman Loftis, S. (2021, March 22). Disability, access, and the virtual conference. OUPblog. https://blog.oup.com/2021/03/disability-access-and-the-virtual-conference/

Martin, J. L., & Wright, K. E. (2023). Bias in Automatic Speech Recognition: The Case of African American Language. Applied Linguistics, 44(4), 613–630. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amac066

Mingus, M. (2010, May 3). Wherever You Are Is Where I Want To Be: Crip Solidarity. Leaving Evidence. https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2010/05/03/where-ever-you-are-is-where-i-want-to-be-crip-solidarity/

Ragnedda, M., & Gladkova, A. (2020). Digital Inequalities in the Global South. Springer Nature.

Yergeau, M. (2014). Disability Hacktivism. Computers and Composition Online. http://cconlinejournal.org/hacking/#yergeau