Accessibility efforts, how we can make the world usable and useful to as many
people as possible, have explicitly focused on how we can support and allow for
the autonomy and independence of people with disabilities, neurotypes, chronic
conditions, and older adults. Despite these efforts, not all technology is
designed or implemented to support everyone's needs. Recently, a
community-organized push by creators and general users of TikTok urged the
platform to add accessibility features, such as closed captioning to
user-generated content, allowing more people to use the platform with greater
ease. Our work focuses on an understudied population -- people with ADHD and
those who experience similar challenges -- exploring the creative practices
people from this community engage in, focusing on the kinds of accessibility
they create through their creative work. Through an interview study exploring
the experiences of creatives on TikTok, we find that creatives engage in
critical infrastructuring -- a process of bottom-up (re)design -- to make the
platform more accessible despite the challenges the platform presents to them
as creators. We present these critical infrastructuring practices through the
themes of: creating and augmenting video editing infrastructures and creating
and augmenting video captioning infrastructures. We reflect on the introduction
of a top-down infrastructure - the implementation of an auto-captioning feature
- shifts the critical infrastructure practices of content creators. Through
their infrastructuring, creatives revised sociotechnical capabilities of TikTok
to support their own needs as well as the broader needs of the TikTok
community. We discuss how the routine of infrastructuring accessibility is
actually best conceptualized as incidental care work. We further highlight how
accessibility is an evolving sociotechnical construct, and forward the concept
of contextual accessibility.Comment: To be published in: Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. CSCW '2