Sofia Strömqvist 30% seminar

Discussant: Stefan Johansson, KTH and Begripsam

Supervisors: Jan Gulliksen, KTH, EECS/MID and Anne-Kathrin Peters, KTH/ITM

Title: Co-creating Co-creational Space: Exploring Participatory Accessibility Education 
This seminar presents reflections from my PhD situated within the European AccessCoVE project (European center of Vocational Excellence in Accessibility), a collaboration across four European countries and 22 partner organizations aimed at developing educational programs in accessibility. AccessCoVE focuses on strengthening accessibility-related competence by developing vocational training programmes through cross-sectoral collaboration between academia, industry, and user organizations. Within this context, I am exploring how values drawn from Participatory Design and Critical and Emancipatory Disability Studies can inform the design of education in accessibility, both locally, in course formats at KTH, and more broadly across AccessCoVE’s ongoing development efforts. As part of this exploration, I facilitated a participatory session in a master’s-level HCI course in collaboration with Begripsam, a Swedish organization advocating for cognitive accessibility. The session was informed by a framework for involving human diversity in a co-design process and brought together students and consultants with lived experience of disability. Together they discussed accessibility not only as a technical or standards-based concern, but as a relational, situated, and co-created process. Through this work, I’ve encountered frictions in how accessibility is conceptualized across different cultural, institutional, and disciplinary settings within the consortium. These tensions surface important questions about the value foundations guiding accessibility work, and how participatory, justice-oriented approaches might be meaningfully integrated within large-scale, deliverable-oriented projects. In this seminar, I will share reflections of the pilot session held at KTH, introduce the conceptual framing guiding my research, and outline potential next steps. This includes applying for ethical approval and planning future iterations that allow for empirical data collection through interviews and student reflections relating to the pilot held here at KTH. It also includes conducting a systematic literature review of participatory approaches in accessibility education, methods supporting a continued iterative path towards the design of a participatory educational format and guide supporting it.