When Assistive Technologies become Provocations: Unpacking Access in HCI practices using Crip Technoscience, Mouth Interfaces, and XR

XR technologies often presume hand-based interaction as universal, marginalizing people with limited mobility. In close collaboration with two disabled artists, we developed a mouth interface that reimagines XR interaction, foregrounding disabled practices. Rather than positioning as an accessibility “fix,” we stage the interface as an activist provocation against hand-centric design. Using a narrative-flip method, we asked early-stage HCI researchers to use the interface without context, later revealing its disability-led, activist origins. This before/after framing exposed how the participants imagined accessibility, shifting from awkwardness and discomfort to empathy and political reflection − yet sliding back into solutionist product thinking. Through analysis of participants’ reflections, enriched by our disabled collaborator’s feedback, we reveal how accessibility was framed as a fix, as political, and as agency. We argue that accessibility research in HCI can move beyond solutionist fixes: assistive technologies as provocations that disrupt able-bodied assumptions and expand how access is imagined.