Participant Recruitment in Accessibility Research

Join us during the week of October 20–26, 2025 for virtual sessions to discuss current practices, key challenges, and guidelines in recruiting participants for accessibility studies.

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Application closed: Aug 22, 2025

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Welcome email sent: Aug 25, 2025

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Early registration closed: Aug 28, 2025

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Availability poll sent: Sep 25, 2025

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Registration closed: Oct 19, 2025

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Workshop sessions: Oct 21 • Oct 22 • Oct 24

About

“Nothing about us without us” emphasizes the importance of including disability communities at every stage of computing accessibility research. However, recruiting participants with disabilities presents a range of challenges—including defining recruitment criteria, verifying eligibility, addressing ethical concerns, sustaining engagement, and navigating the tension between genuine inclusion and avoiding both tokenism and participant over-burdening.

This workshop will bring together members of the ASSETS community to discuss current recruiting practices and identify insights into ethical, rigorous, and inclusive participant recruitment in disability research. We will explore three main topics:

Recruitment methods and models
Eligibility criteria and participant verification
Ethical and sustainability considerations

The workshop aims to share current practices, identify key challenges, and develop preliminary guidelines to support accessibility researchers in more sustainable participant recruitment.

Call for Participation

Application closed: August 22, 2025

Our workshop aims to address critical issues related to participant recruitment by fostering discussion around how to effectively and ethically recruit participants with disabilities for accessibility research studies. We invite participation from a diverse group of accessibility researchers to share current challenges and practices in participant recruitment and to collaboratively envision the future of inclusive recruitment. We believe this conversation will make a timely and valuable contribution to the field.

We welcome submissions and participation from researchers across all career stages, disciplines, and geographic regions, with particular encouragement for those from the Global South, non-Western countries, and those whose work addresses the unique needs and contexts of these regions. We recognize that accessibility research has historically centered Western and Global North perspectives, and we seek to amplify a broader range of voices.

Our workshop is part of the ASSETS’25 conference. ASSETS is an ACM conference: the Association for Computing Machinery, the world’s largest educational computing society. Attendees do not need to register for the conference to apply for the workshop.

To apply, please complete a Google Form with a Statement of Interest (SOI) by Friday, August 22, 2025. You will be asked to briefly address the following:

Your experience recruiting participants with disabilities—including which communities you have worked with and your considerations related to the workshop’s three core themes: recruitment methods, eligibility criteria and verification, and ethical/sustainability concerns.
Why are you interested in participating in this workshop?
Which workshop theme(s) are you most interested in?
Any access needs you would like us to accommodate to support your participation.

Participation in the workshop is open to researchers with experience recruiting human participants in at least one disability- or accessibility-related study. Attendees will be selected based on their responses in the Statement of Interest form.

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Application closed

Complete the Google Form to share your interest and your accessibility recruiting experiences.

Application closed

Please join us! Email questions to: lloydmay@stanford.edu

Schedule

Three online sessions during the week of October 20–26, 2025

We will run the workshop online via Zoom across three sessions (see Table 1) during the week of October 20–26. We divide it into three online sessions spread over multiple days to reduce participant fatigue. The exact dates and times based on selected participants' availability are shown in Table 1.

Before the Workshop

We will communicate by email with instructions on how to register, a link to submit your availability for the three sessions, and details on joining the workshop’s Discord.
We will also ask each participant to submit a short paragraph introducing themselves.

During the Workshop

The workshop will consist of synchronous themed group small discussions, followed by summarization of the discussion.
We will post summaries of the discussions to Discord after every session to also support asynchronous discussions before sharing out.
We will begin with discussions around the workshop's topics, followed by discussions centered around specific interests indicated by participants.

After the Workshop

We will maintain access to the workshop's content for asynchronous interactions.
The organizers will also write a white paper summarizing the workshop's outcomes and invite interested participants to contribute.

**Table 1.** Final Workshop Session Schedule
Session	Date	Time (Eastern \| Pacific \| East African time)	Duration	Focus
Session 1	Oct 21, 2025	3:00 PM – 4:30 PM (Eastern) \| 12:00 PM – 1:30 PM (Pacific) \| 10:00 PM – 11:30 PM (East African time)	90 min	Welcome & introductions, followed by themed group discussions and summarization.
Session 2	Oct 22, 2025	3:00 PM – 4:30 PM (Eastern) \| 12:00 PM – 1:30 PM (Pacific) \| 10:00 PM – 11:30 PM (East African time)	90 min	Begin with a shareout from the small groups from Session 1, including discussions on Discord. Then, interest-based group discussions and summarization.
Session 3	Oct 24, 2025	11:00 AM – 12:00 PM (Eastern) \| 8:00 AM – 9:00 AM (Pacific) \| 6:00 PM – 7:00 PM (East African time)	60 min	Begin with a shareout from the small groups from Session 2, including discussions on Discord. Then, identify themes, concrete recommendations, and lingering questions identified throughout the workshop.