Design happens at the intersection of imagination and interface. The moment of prototyping is where an idea begins to take shape as something others can test, critique, and adopt. But the tools designers rely on—digital canvases, low-fidelity mockups, whiteboards, or paper sketches—carry invisible assumptions about who is allowed to speak up, what senses can be used, and how quickly ideas should move. When those assumptions misalign with real human variation, the future that gets prototyped may exclude as much as it invites.
A team spanning Portugal, the UK, and the United States asks what happens if we flip that script. The Access InContext project, a CHI 2025 workshop, centers on prototyping tools and methods that are built to be accessible in context, not merely accessible in theory. Led by Patricia Piedade and Peter A. Hayton—co-leaders from the University of Lisbon’s Interactive Technologies Institute and Open Lab at Newcastle University—the effort brings together universities, Google Research, and civic-tech collaborators to rethink how prototyping is done in labs, classrooms, and workshops around the world.
They argue that accessibility should be a design constraint as fundamental as speed or clarity. If you can imagine a prototype that works for someone who cannot use a mouse, or someone who processes information differently, you may unlock better workflows for everyone. In other words, making prototyping more inclusive could become a catalyst for better design practices across the board, from education to industry.
But this is not just about fancy new apps. It’s about the social fabric of innovation: who gets to contribute, who gets to participate, and who gets to decide what counts as a successful prototype. The authors frame this as a justice issue, connected to a broader movement in technology that centers disabled voices in the design process. They invite readers to picture a future where the prototyping stage itself models the values of inclusion and participation—rather than treating accessibility as a box to tick after the fact.
The work behind Access InContext is rooted in collaboration across institutions that foreground accessibility and civic tech. Patricia Piedade and Peter A. Hayton, equal contributors, spearhead the effort from the University of Lisbon’s Interactive Technologies Institute and Open Lab at Newcastle University, with partners including Google Research and Northumbria University, among others. Their cross-continental alliance illustrates how practical, lived experience can align with high-level research to reframe what it means to prototype in the 21st century.
Why Prototyping Tools Fail Disabled Designers
Even as prototyping tools promise to speed up invention, they often replicate a narrow set of abilities. The paper cites a long-running issue in the field: many GUI controls in popular prototyping software are not friendly to screen readers, keyboard navigation, or alternative input devices. When a majority of participants in a session cannot reliably access the tool in use, the collaborative spark gets dimmed before it can flare into something transformative.
These design frictions aren’t merely technical glitches; they shape who gets to contribute and, ultimately, what ideas survive. In mixed-ability groups, for instance, the roundtable dynamic can tilt toward those who can physically move large sheets of paper or who can manipulate a multi-step digital workflow with ease. Neurodivergent participants, too, may prefer different pacing or modalities, but traditional ideation sessions often don’t accommodate those variations. The result is a prototype system that reflects a subset of the team’s lived experiences, not a chorus of diverse perspectives.
Context matters because prototyping happens in real rooms, with real people who bring different sensory and cognitive profiles. The authors argue that accessibility cannot be a separate stage or a separate group; it must be woven into how design decisions are made and how tools are used in situ. They remind us that this is not merely about making things easier for disabled designers—it’s about expanding design thinking itself to consider more kinds of futures and more kinds of users from day one.
55 percent of GUI controls in prototyping tools have accessibility issues for screen reader users, a figure cited to illustrate the scale of the challenge. This isn’t an abstract concern; it’s a practical reality that forces teams to improvise around blockers rather than address root causes. The authors emphasize that the design process itself should be accessible, which in turn elevates the quality of the prototypes produced. When the process invites diverse minds to participate, the ideas that survive are more robust, more iterative, and more humane.
In context, accessibility becomes a lived practice rather than a checklist item. The paper argues that design sessions in labs, classrooms, and maker spaces must be engineered around the realities of disability, neurodiversity, and cognitive variation. The goal is not to create a separate lane for inclusion but to broaden the entire design lane so that more people can contribute with confidence and clarity.
Access InContext and Futuring Accessible Prototyping
Access InContext crystallizes a simple ambition with a bold claim: question the status quo of prototyping tools, remix what exists, and imagine new methods that center participation from people with disabilities. It’s less a single gadget than a design manifesto for the prototyping process itself. The workshop aims to surface practical adaptations—like rethinking how a digital whiteboard should behave for screen readers, or how physical prototyping sessions can be structured so that everyone can contribute without being overwhelmed by table-top chaos.
The plan is concrete: a hybrid, inclusive workshop that blends in-person and remote participation, asynchronous prompts, and multimodal accessibility measures. Sign language interpretation, CART for live captions, and accessible submission formats are baked into the process. And the team promises to publish workshop artefacts openly, inviting researchers, designers, and communities to reuse, critique, and extend the ideas. The aim is to turn a one-off event into a living conversation that travels beyond a conference deadline.
Crucially, the project treats accessibility not as a separate feature but as a structural lens for design. By foregrounding disability justice, the organizers push toward tools and methods that invite a broader spectrum of intelligence, creativity, and lived experience into the design room. The collaboration explicitly spans institutions with a track record in human-centered design, digital civics, and inclusive technology, including the University of Lisbon, Newcastle Open Lab, Northumbria University, Cardiff Metropolitan University, the University of St Andrews, TU Wien, and Rochester Institute of Technology, among others. The aim is not to silo this work but to seed a worldwide practice where prototyping is co-created with the people who will use and be affected by the outcomes.
One practical twist is the idea of multisensory, low-cost prototyping as a legitimate path to insight. The workshop invites participants to experiment with household crafting materials—plasticine, pipe cleaners, paper, and even scent markers—to explore ideas beyond the screen. This is about democratizing ideation and revealing how different modalities can surface complementary truths about a design. It’s a reminder that prototyping is not a form of decoration but a mode of thinking that can be shared across cultures, abilities, and resources.
In addition to deliberate inclusivity, the plan includes a rigorous publication strategy. Artefacts produced during the workshop will be archived in arXiv and on the project website, with options for participants to opt out of public sharing. The commitment to accessible documentation—alt-text, captions, and readable formats—reflects a broader ambition to build an open, practical knowledge base that others can adopt, adapt, and critique. This is not a conference stunt; it is a blueprint for ongoing conversation and collaboration among researchers, designers, and disabled communities alike.
Thus Access InContext is more than a meeting of minds; it’s a statement about how research and practice can meet at the intersection of justice and invention. By making the workshop itself accessible, the organizers model a different standard for how scholarly communities should operate. They invite participants to bring not only their expertise but also their lived experience, their questions, and their craft. If successful, the approach could cascade into classrooms, studios, and corporate labs, nudging prototyping toward a future in which accessibility is the default, not the exception.
The project’s backbone is a constellation of partners across Europe and the United States. The lead researchers—Patricia Piedade and Peter A. Hayton—are supported by colleagues from Google Research and academic hubs including Northumbria University, Cardiff Metropolitan University, and the University of St Andrews. Their cross-disciplinary collaboration embodies a growing recognition that creating tech for all is not a side project; it’s a prerequisite for meaningful, durable innovation that stands the test of real-world use.
What This Could Mean for the Design of Tomorrow
If prototyping tools were built to be intelligible and usable from the ground up, the ripple effects could touch everything from classrooms to product teams. A tool that is friendly to screen readers, to keyboards, and to people who prefer tactile exploration could reduce cognitive load, speed up consensus, and make criticisms more specific. When everyone can point to the same artifact and speak about it in a shared vocabulary, teams may converge on better ideas faster, while also surfacing viewpoints that would otherwise be silenced.
Beyond mere usability, the approach invites a redefinition of what a prototype is. Today’s workflow often values fidelity and visual polish; tomorrow’s might prize multimodal expression, storytelling through multisensory artifacts, and co-creative sessions that do not require any single participant to navigate a single dominant modality. This could empower students and researchers who historically found prototyping a barrier, not a doorway, to experimentation. It’s a shift from tool-enabled ideation to inclusive ideation.
Finally, the project points to a broader shift in how institutions, tech companies, and researchers collaborate. The CHI workshop is not the endgame but a launchpad for a culture in which accessible prototyping is treated as a joint responsibility of makers, scholars, and communities. The authors—grounded in esteemed institutions and diverse perspectives—embrace a future in which disability justice informs design practice as a matter of course. If this momentum continues, the next wave of prototypes may look less like a final polished artifact and more like a living ecosystem that evolves with the people who shape it.
For teachers and academies, the call is a reminder that prototyping in the classroom can be a microcosm of civic life. If students learn to design with accessible tools from the start, they carry that habit into every field they touch—engineering, policy, art, and entrepreneurship. The resulting prototypes may not only be more usable but more imaginative, because their creators had to question assumptions in the moment, not after a rushed demo. That, in turn, could accelerate a future where technology grows in tandem with the people who will use it, rather than in spite of them.
