Social Class, School and Visual Impairments: Reflections from the field

International audience; The additional fee must be paid to ACM. This text field is large enough to hold the appropriate release statement assuming it is single spaced in a sans-serif 7 point font. Every submission will be assigned their own unique DOI string to be included here. Abstract Research on the design of assistive educational technologies rarely explicitly address the implications of children's sociodemographic characteristics, such as class, race and gender. Through a field-study with children with visual impairments , we investigated how their experiences of the classroom and of disability varied depending on their socioeconomic contexts. Children whose families were of lower socioeconomic status were more likely to report feeling excluded, and to refer to school as a "hardship" with "little purpose." We reflect here on the extent to which design interventions can contribute to (re)shape these experiences , and on the position of the researcher as an ally.