Belén Barros Pena and Helena Lyhme travelled to Cardiff on the 9th of November to take part in the Accessibility in Austerity workshop (http://austerityaccess.online/), a space designed to confront a question many in accessibility research feel acutely right now: how do we continue doing meaningful, ethical, community-centred work when resources keep shrinking?

The day began with introductions, during which we shared our research areas and even a few childhood talents.

We then turned to questions about what gets cut, what persists, and who is affected most when accessibility is squeezed by economic and political pressures.

By midday, the tables were covered in sticky notes. In small groups, we sorted, reshuffled, and clustered them until clear themes started to emerge. What we produced together was a collective snapshot of the accessibility landscape under austerity: messy, interconnected, and full of tensions, but also full of care and imagination.

One of the strongest threads running through our discussions was the need for better academic networks. As traditional online spaces fragment and institutional pressures grow, people are looking for more sustainable ways to connect, collaborate, and support each other’s work. That desire for community also shaped conversations about participants and compensation, which surfaced as one of the most urgent issues. Recruiting disabled participants ethically is already hard; austerity adds obstacles at every layer, from admin delays to travel costs, to the need for new models that recognise disabled collaborators as experts, not just "subjects".

We also spoke about how accessibility is too often treated superficially, as a checklist or an afterthought. Many people shared frustrations about having to convince people that accessibility is more than guidelines: it’s context-specific, relational, and deeply entangled with lived experience. This is linked closely to our conversations about ethics, where biomedical framings and institutional processes were seen as barriers that can limit participatory work. There was a clear call for ethics guidance that genuinely supports researchers and participants rather than simply protecting institutions.

Another emotional theme was community building. Many of us have seen the damage caused when research relationships end abruptly or when disabled partners feel used, unheard, or forgotten. There’s a strong desire to build reciprocal, long-term partnerships that don’t disappear the moment a grant ends. But this is difficult in a system that rewards box-ticking, fast outputs, and polished "solutions" over slower, relational work. Several people reflected on how accessible design is increasingly framed through innovation narratives - especially AI - while the underlying social, political, and material realities remain overlooked.

And hovering over all of this was the political environment. Cuts to disability benefits, Access to Work, public transport, and research funding shape the conditions under which accessibility research happens. Visa restrictions and funding disparities for international students add another layer of inequality. In this context, the invisible labour of accessibility (time, emotional care, admin, planning, training...) becomes even harder to sustain. We spoke about the exhaustion of trying to do deeply ethical work in a system that is structurally misaligned with those values.

Finally, we arrived at funding, the thread that tied nearly everything together. Finding and securing funding for accessibility work, especially in community-centred or exploratory settings, is increasingly difficult. We shared frustrations but also strategies: forming collectives, sharing knowledge, identifying sympathetic funders, and building arguments that make the value of accessibility impossible to ignore.

By the end of the workshop, our sticky-note clusters had become a kind of communal map not just of problems, but of commitments and possibilities. Even though much of the conversation centred on cuts, constraints, and structural barriers, we left Cardiff feeling quietly hopeful. There’s a community here that cares deeply, pushes back thoughtfully, and refuses to let austerity define what accessibility can be.

And maybe that’s the real takeaway: we can’t face austerity alone, but together we can imagine ways through it, grounded in connection, reciprocity, and the refusal to compromise on access and dignity.

The workshop was organised as part of BCS HCI 2025 by

• Timothy Neate, King's College London

• Beatrice Vincenzi, Birmingham City University

• Belén Barros Pena, City St Georges, University of London

• Alexandre Nevsky, King's College London

• Sarah Lewthwaite, University of Southampton

• Shital Desai, York University

• Fernando Loizides, Cardiff University

• Humphrey Curtis, King's College London

• Filip Bircanin, King's College London