Access Intimacy as Feeling, Practice, and Political Vision: An Inclusive Research with Visually Impaired Participants in Hong Kong

Abstract

This article explores access intimacy as feeling, interactional practice, and political vision through an inclusive research project in Hong Kong, where 12 visually impaired adults and 35 university students collaboratively developed accessible board games. Drawing on Mingus’s interdependence framework and Valentine’s justice-based access, we position visually impaired participants as primary knowledge producers while critically examining vulnerability, power dynamics, and research ethics. Analysis of field observations and in-depth interviews reveals three key dimensions: (1) collaborative game design enabled visually impaired participants to experience emotional access by fostering friendship, recognition, and belonging beyond logistical accessibility; (2) negotiation around “independence” and “fairness” generated transformative empowerment for both visually impaired and sighted participants, reframing interdependence as strength; and (3) reciprocal vulnerability in sighted guiding practices disrupted ableist assumptions about autonomy, care, and risk, revealing care as mutual rather than unidirectional. We argue that access intimacy functions as a learnable relational skill, and that attending to it in research design, community planning, and accessibility policy fosters justice-based paradigms that move beyond accommodation toward genuine interdependence and solidarity.

1. Introduction

Both authors of this article are sighted individuals with several years of experience engaging with the visually impaired community. In our daily lives, we frequently meet and socialize with our visually impaired friends, and these relationships have made the textures of access, dependence, and everyday negotiation highly visible to us. Yet we have rarely seen such lived experiences taken seriously in academic discussions. In Hong Kong, research on visual impairment remains limited, and few studies examine accessible design in local contexts. (Cheung et al. 2021; Lam et al. 2020; Ng et al. 2021; Siu 2007). These studies predominantly adopt a technological perspective, framing accessibility primarily as assistance or accommodation. However, the everyday interactions and embodied experiences we share with our visually impaired friends—marked by complex power relations, interdependence, and forms of intimate understanding such as sighted guidance or audio description—have rarely been examined in academic research, particularly in Asian contexts.

Disability activist and educator Mia Mingus’s concept of access intimacy resonates deeply with these observations. Mingus (2011) conceptualizes access intimacy as both a feeling and a state: the indescribable sense of being “understood” when someone truly grasps one’s access needs, and the bodily ease and safety that arise when these needs are met. Disabled people often encounter access framed as a burden, or access provided out of obligation without any sense of connection—merely task-oriented and transactional. Critically, Mingus emphasizes that access intimacy is not simply a matter of assistance. Rather, its foundation lies in mutual respect and understanding, a relational closeness that binds people together. Importantly, access intimacy does not require environments to be perfectly accessible. It values the shared process of creating access within an ableist society and the solidarity that emerges when navigating an inaccessible world together. Building on Mingus’s work, Volion (2020) argues that access intimacy fills a crucial emotional and relational gap within disability communities, highlighting how it can reshape everyday interactions and community practices.

Applying this concept to our relationships with visually impaired friends gives us a vocabulary for what we have long sought to articulate. The specific embodied practices of visual impairment—such as physically moving through sighted guidance or internalizing the describer’s perspective during audio description—constitute particularly intimate forms of access. These practices involve bodily and perceptual exchange that merit scholarly attention. By foregrounding the lived experiences and narratives of visually impaired individuals, this research aims to enrich both the conceptual and practical understanding of access intimacy.

Despite the significance of access intimacy, the concept has received relatively limited scholarly attention since Mingus (2011) introduced it (Volion 2020). A few recent works have begun to engage with its practical and political implications, yet there remains little research directly examining access intimacy within visually impaired communities or within Asian disability scholarship more broadly. To address this gap, we designed an inclusive research project in 2024/2025, grounded in participatory principles, in which 12 visually impaired adults and 35 university students collaboratively adapted board games. Board games provided a safe, intergenerational, and social medium that facilitated natural interaction and rapport among participants. We generated data through participant observation and in-depth interviews conducted throughout the design process, alongside a post-event survey completed by all 35 student participants. Our analysis foregrounds the perspectives and experiences of the visually impaired participants to explore and extend the conceptual and political boundaries of access intimacy. At the same time, the research project itself functioned as an experimental enactment of access intimacy, designed to empower visually impaired participants and to examine its political and transformative potential (Romero-Fresco 2023).

The following sections present our theoretical framework, research questions, and methodology, followed by findings and analysis that contribute to disability justice scholarship and advance understanding of access intimacy as a relational, ethical, and political practice.

2. Access Intimacy and Interdependence

Mingus (2017) connects access intimacy with interdependence and the principles of disability justice, emphasizing that disability is a universal human experience that anyone may encounter. She critiques how mainstream notions of “inclusion” reproduce ableist norms by privileging individualism and independence. Within such framework, disabled people are expected to adapt independently to systems designed by and for the non-disabled, reducing accessibility to a checklist of logistical accommodations. This approach overlooks disabled people’s multifaceted needs and often devalues their contributions beyond productivity. In contrast, access intimacy is grounded in a collective “we,” affirming interdependence as an authentic and universal human condition. This relational model recognizes that everyone has inherent value and the capacity to contribute. Through access intimacy practices, individuals gain deeper insight into the oppression produced by inaccessibility and ableism, thereby facilitating shifts in power relations and advancing liberation and justice.

Valentine (2020) extends Mingus’s framework by distinguishing between two approaches to access: rights-based and justice-based. The rights-based approach remains logistical and accommodationist, addressing practical issues of accessibility without challenging the underlying ableist social structures. While this framework has achieved important victories for disabled people, Valentine argues it remains constrained by ableist and capitalist logics. Specifically, it equates “independence” with equality, measures bodily worth through productivity, and permits participation primarily from bodies that can be “fixed” to fit systems of labor and efficiency. The justice-based approach, by contrast, begins with the recognition of human interdependence. It values the diverse corporeal and emotional experiences of disabled people, exposes the structural oppression inherent in ableism, and asserts a transformative vision: disabled people need not assimilate into existing systems. Rather, non-disabled people must learn how to enter and engage with disabled worlds. In this sense, justice-based access centers access intimacy as its relational and ethical foundation.

3. Access Intimacy as a Learnable Skill

Piepzna-Samarasinha (2018) describes access intimacy as a learnable process and skill, one that non-disabled people can also cultivate through commitment and practice. This framing situates access intimacy as a dynamic and inclusive way of building relationships, rather than as a rare or ineffable experience. They further emphasize that access intimacy is not spontaneous or “magical” but rooted in respect for disabled people’s experiential knowledge. Learning it requires non-disabled people to relinquish the “savior” mentality and to move from the position of observer to that of learner and ally, thereby challenging capitalist logics that construe disability as burden. Through such practice, access intimacy can extend from individual interactions to collective spaces, nurturing a culture of interdependence and enabling communities to share what they term “crip wealth”, the accumulated disability-centered knowledge, care practices, and networks of support that emerge from disabled people’s lived experience and mutual aid.

Valentine (2020) similarly argues that access intimacy can be developed as a skill through sustained listening to and respect for disabled people’s experiential knowledge. It also requires joint practice by both disabled and non-disabled people. This practice is grounded in recognizing the value of disability and of symbiotic relationships, and it drives transformations in interpersonal dynamics and ways of being—recasting “access” as a collective responsibility rather than an individual obligation. In doing so, it challenges individualized myths of “independence” and market-based ideals of self-sufficiency, emphasizing forms of freedom rooted in connection, collaboration, and relationship. As access intimacy becomes more widely practiced, it has the potential to reshape power relations and value systems within ableist worlds, aligning access work with broader projects of disability justice.

4. Access Intimacy and Vulnerability Politics

Drawing on his experience as a documentary filmmaker, Romero-Fresco (2023) analyzes alternative audio description (AD) practices informed by access intimacy. He argues that access should move beyond frameworks of obligation and technical compliance. Conventional approaches to media accessibility often prioritize functionality and supposed objectivity, separating creators from audiences and resulting in what he terms dehumanizing access. In this model, sighted viewing is treated as the “normal” or “original” version, marginalizing interpretive diversity and positioning blind and visually impaired audiences as passive receivers of an adapted product. By contrast, creative access practices open up new modes of encounter and interaction, fostering human connection and explicitly anti-ableist practice. For Romero-Fresco, relationships of access intimacy hinge on shared vulnerability: when both providers and receivers of access expose their uncertainty and limitations, they enact trust and responsibility and create possibilities for genuinely reciprocal connection.

The politics of such relationality can be linked to feminist accounts of vulnerability politics. Butler (2020) asserts that vulnerability is both a condition of our interdependent existence and a site through which injustice can be exposed, making it a point of departure for political struggle. Moro (2022) extends this view by framing vulnerability as a relational and collective resource for action, rather than as an individual deficit. Knight (2021) emphasizes that effective vulnerability politics should enhance autonomy, enabling those perceived as vulnerable to collectively determine sustainable ways of living. Castelli (2018) further articulates an embodied understanding of vulnerability, urging action and alliance through interdependence as a means of driving institutional transformation. Taken together, these perspectives suggest that vulnerability practiced within relations of access intimacy extends beyond emotional disclosure. It carries ethical and political significance, expressing pursuits of autonomy and justice through mutual dependence and care.

In this article, the willingness of participants to express and respond to vulnerability—and the political and transformative dimensions embedded in that willingness—constitutes a central area of inquiry. Both students and visually impaired participants enacted vulnerability in distinct yet interconnected ways. Although students received basic training in guiding techniques, many expressed nervousness when leading their visually impaired teammates. This discomfort unsettled habitual sighted-centric assumptions and required them to continually attune to their partners’ needs. During the collaborative process of adapting board games, visually impaired participants were invited to articulate their access needs when playing, making aspects of their socially constructed “limitations” available for collective discussion and negotiation. Such exchanges depended on an atmosphere of mutual trust and responsibility. These moments of vulnerable exposure and of “holding place” for one another (Romero-Fresco 2023, p. 10) formed key conditions for the emergence of access intimacy. In line with this aspiration “to create a space for disabled and non-disabled people to resist ableism and reimagine how we relate to one another—a space for sharing and caring” (Romero-Fresco 2023, p. 20), this project explores how such spaces can be enacted through collaborative board-game design.

5. Research on Access Intimacy

Access intimacy remains a developing concept within academic discourse. In recent years, scholarship has increasingly engaged its implications for artistic practice, focusing on the reconfiguration of power, the intersections of ethics and aesthetics, and the creative potential of accessibility (Holfeuer 2021; Romero-Fresco 2023; Miranda 2025; Savard 2025). Studies in education and community practice have likewise adopted access intimacy as an analytical and practical framework. For example, Cannon and Hernández-Saca (2024) employ a storying approach to advance educational justice centered on the voices of marginalized groups, while Bessey et al. (2023), in their “ReVisioning Fitness” project, redefine fitness through relational accessibility, critiquing the superficial forms of inclusion often promoted within capitalist fitness cultures. Collectively, these works underscore the importance of interrogating power relations embedded in everyday interactions and of cultivating environments of accessible interdependence and intimacy that amplify marginalized voices.

Most relevant to our study is Capwell Giles’s (2025) reflective autoethnography. As a hard-of-hearing scholar, Capwell Giles explores the interpersonal and ethical dimensions of Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART), a form of real-time captioning within U.S. universities. She argues that human captioners—who transcribe the full soundscape, including tone, overlap, and contextual nuance—provide a qualitatively richer form of access than AI-generated captions, whose limitations often constrain meaningful participation. Drawing on her personal experience, Capwell Giles describes how sustained collaboration with captioners transformed a formerly administrative service arrangement into a space of mutual trust, a “contact zone” in which captioners became supportive partners who not only facilitated learning but also offered emotional care, such as providing words of comfort during the pandemic. From this, she contends that access intimacy emerges through ongoing relational processes of knowing, sharing, supporting, learning, and engaging. It is thus a learnable relational practice that embodies care and human understanding, allowing accessibility to move beyond efficiency and technical compliance and to gesture instead toward an affective and ethical common world.

6. Research Questions

Valentine (2020) proposes that access intimacy can be understood through three interrelated dimensions: as feeling, as practice, and as political vision. This framework informs the following research questions, which examine how visually impaired participants and students co-create access intimacy through their interactions:

(1)

As feeling, we explore whether and in what ways participants’ affective access needs are recognized and addressed.

(2)

As practice, we examine how participants collaboratively construct a “space of empowerment” (Valentine 2020, p. 92) during the process of interaction.

(3)

As political, we analyze how participants collaboratively adapt board games in order to engage in “co-inhabiting others’ perspectives,” (Valentine 2020, p. 85) and how this process enables them to reflect on and challenge dominant conceptions of accessibility, opening transformative and creative possibilities for justice-based access.

7. Methodology and Methods

7.1. Ethics of Vulnerability

Our research proposal underwent review by the university’s research ethics committee. During this process, the committee expressed concern about whether adult participants with visual impairments could provide informed consent independently and whether their participation might entail heightened safety risks, particularly in traveling to the university. Within institutional ethics protocols, adults with visual impairments are categorized as “vulnerable participants,” and their physical impairment is at times implicitly conflated with cognitive impairment. These assumptions raised questions about autonomy, guardianship, and mobility that we considered important to address.

In response, we clarified that adults with visual impairments, including those in our study, are fully capable of making informed decisions about their participation. We further emphasized that the reduced vision does not inherently correlate with cognitive impairment, even though the two may coincide in some cases. We also explained that visual impairment encompasses a wide spectrum, from low vision to total blindness, and that vision loss does not necessarily preclude independent mobility. In everyday life, visually impaired adults in Hong Kong typically develop strategies for traveling independently—such as navigating familiar routes and using public transport—to reach a designated metro station, after which organizers can reasonably provide accompaniment between the station and the research venue. Our aim was not to deny the existence of risk, but to contextualize it and resist automatic assumptions of incapacity.

Gustafson and Brunger (2014) report similar challenges in a feminist participatory action research project conducted with disabled communities. They argue that research ethics regulations frequently construct “vulnerable populations” in ways that function as paternalistic protection mechanisms. Such constructions, while ostensibly protective, can inadvertently discriminate against disabled people and obstruct genuinely equal collaboration and empowerment. Our experience with the ethics review process resonates with this critique.

We recognize and share the committee’s concern for the safety and well-being of participants whose bodies may be read as vulnerable. We likewise seek to prevent power imbalances from arising within the research process. However, some of the concerns raised reflect limited understanding of the lived realities of people with visual impairments in Hong Kong. For example, the assumption that adults with visual impairments require guardians is a significant misconception that erases their existing practices of autonomy and self-determination. In 2024, for example, two visually impaired passengers were removed from a Hong Kong Express flight shortly before taking off; they were judged not to meet safety requirements without sighted companions (Hung 2024). The incident provoked strong criticism within the local visually impaired community. Taken together, such events illustrate how bodily vulnerability is often equated with a lack of autonomy, a prejudice that this study seeks to interrogate and challenge.

Mackenzie (2014) argues that vulnerability is not an inherent trait of particular individuals but the outcome of intersecting structural and relational conditions. Excessive or misdirected “protection” can create what she describes as pathological vulnerability, in which disabled people are excluded from decision-making processes and access to resources. In response, she advocates a relational understanding of autonomy: even when a person experiences bodily or cognitive limitations, they can still act as an autonomous agent through relational support and appropriately structured environments. From this perspective, care and services for disabled people should not be limited to preventing harm or meeting basic needs. They should also aim to preserve and enhance disabled people’s capacities and standing as decision-makers and protagonists in their own lives.

These reflections informed our methodological decisions and prompted us to attend closely to the dynamics of power in our research interactions and to the construction of supportive environments. In designing and conducting the study, we sought to enact an ethics of access intimacy—one that recognizes vulnerability as relational, resists paternalistic constructions of “the vulnerable participant,” and affirms visually impaired adults as capable collaborators and knowledge producers.

7.2. Inclusive Research and Participatory Approach

Inclusive research has been widely discussed within disability studies as a way to transform traditional research relationships. Oliver (1992) proposed emancipatory research as the most radical end of the participatory spectrum, positioning disabled people as those who should fully lead knowledge production, with non-disabled researchers acting only as allies. Walmsley (2001) later addressed the practical limitations of emancipatory research by introducing the concept of inclusive research, arguing that non-disabled researchers can play a supportive role in enabling disabled people’s participation within real-world constraints, thereby fostering a model of co-production. Building on this, Walmsley and Johnson (2003) urge non-disabled researchers to shift from “expert” to “facilitator,” amplifying disabled people’s lived knowledge while consciously addressing power imbalances.

Nind (2014) conceptualizes inclusive research as a continuum of power-sharing, in which participant involvement can range from limited engagement to full leadership, allowing for flexible and context-sensitive approaches. She notes that inclusive research encompasses multiple participatory and emancipatory orientations, but that these are united by a fundamental shift in research relationships: away from traditional research on disabled people, toward more democratic modes of research with, by, and for them. In this formulation, with signifies equal collaboration, by emphasizes disabled people leading research, and for prioritizes advancing their interests and driving social change.

Scholars have cautioned, however, that true inclusivity demands more than rhetorical commitment; it requires sustained reflection on power dynamics and knowledge production within so-called “participatory” research. Reviewing visual impairment research published between 1999 and 2006, Duckett and Pratt (2007) found limited progress in participatory and emancipatory methods. Much of what was labeled “participation” remained superficial or ritualized, serving primarily as rhetoric that left existing power structures and normalization discourses intact. They therefore call for a political and epistemological reimagining of “inclusion,” in which visually impaired people shift from research subjects to agents of knowledge and action.

Our study is informed by these debates and seeks to align with inclusive research principles by centering visually impaired participants as primary knowledge producers. Within the collaborative adaptation of board games, visually impaired adults and university students work together to identify barriers, devise solutions, and reflect on access, moving the project toward research with and for visually impaired participants rather than research on them. Situated on the “with/for” end of Nind’s (2014) continuum rather than the “by” end, this study acknowledges that key aspects of design, analysis, and dissemination remain researcher-led, a constraint we return to critically in the limitations section. At the same time, the project explores how access intimacy can be enacted as a concrete relational practice rather than remaining solely a theoretical concept.

7.3. Research Design

12 visually impaired adults and 35 university students who completed the full project took part in the study. The project comprised two main phases. In the first phase, students attended three training workshops that introduced them to the visually impaired community and to practical skills such as sighted guiding and basic audio description, alongside introductory exposure to Braille and tactile art. In the second phase, the 12 visually impaired participants and 35 trained students engaged in collaborative work. Participants were divided into six groups, each comprising two visually impaired adults and 5 to 6 students. This phase included four workshops: an initial icebreaker session in which participants played existing board games, sessions for collaboratively selecting and adapting games, and a final workshop in which groups exchanged their adapted games for testing and feedback. Before and after each workshop, student group members escorted visually impaired participants between a nearby metro station and the university venue. During activities, when visually impaired participants required assistance, for example, accessing restrooms—same-gender students provided guidance. As researchers and coordinators, we observed each session and offered support and facilitation as needed.

Following the adaptation phase, we invited all 12 visually impaired participants to take part in semi-structured, in-depth interviews. Although all initially agreed, one participant subsequently became unavailable due to intermittent health issues and prolonged communication difficulties related to phone problems, resulting in 11 completed interviews. The interviews focused on participants’ motivations for joining the project, their experiences of collaborating with students, challenges encountered and addressed, and their reflections on future possibilities for accessible gaming and inclusive interaction.

From the 35 students, we purposively invited eight who had demonstrated particularly proactive engagement during the workshops to participate in in-depth interviews; three accepted, and we refer to them by the pseudonyms Sandy, Susan, and Sam. The main reasons for non-participation among the remaining students included scheduling conflicts and increased academic workload, as the interview period coincided with university examinations and assessment deadlines. While most students were therefore unable to commit to an additional interview, all 35 completed an online post-project survey. The survey combined Likert-type items and open-ended questions about their collaboration with visually impaired adults, perceived skills gained, and understandings of inclusion and access. These data are used descriptively to complement the interview-based analysis presented below. The student interviews that were conducted explored their interactions and relationships with visually impaired group members, their evolving understandings of accessibility and support, and their reflections on vulnerability and interdependence. Taken together with the visually impaired participants’ accounts, these interviews enabled us to analyze access provision and access intimacy from the perspectives of both access receivers and access providers.

7.4. Participant Backgrounds

We collaborated with two major Hong Kong NGOs serving visually impaired people to recruit participants and disseminate information about the research activities. Of the 15 individuals who expressed interest, three were not selected because they could not commit to all sessions (due to illness or other reasons), leaving 12 participants enrolled. These 12 visually impaired adults ranged in age from 20 to 79 years and included 5 women and 7 men with varying levels of visual ability.

Below information of the participants is listed in the following order: Pseudonym name, Gender, Age range, and Vision status.

Participant 1: Albert, Male, 20–29, Blind with no light perception.

Participant 2: Ben, Male, 20–29, Blind with no light perception.

Participant 3: Candy, Female, 30–39, Severe visual impairment (approximately 2–4% vision; highly light-sensitive).

Participant 4: Diana, Female, 30–39, Blind with no light perception.

Participant 5: Ethan, Male, 30–39, Blind with no light perception.

Participant 6: Francis, Male, 30–39, Low vision (albinism; approximately 20% vision).

Participant 7: Gloria, Female, 40–49, Severe low vision (does not require a cane during daytime; uses a cane at night in unfamiliar or poorly lit areas).

Participant 8: Helen, Female, 40–49, Severe low vision (approximately 0.03 visual acuity).

Participant 9: Isabella, Female, 50–59, Low vision (approximately 10–20% vision).

Participant 10: Jack, Male, 60–69, Blind with no light perception.

Participant 11: Ken, Male, 60–69, Moderate to severe visual impairment.

Participant 12: Lucas, Male, 70–79, Blind with no light perception.

Given the involvement of both university students and visually impaired adults, we prioritized ethical standards throughout the study to ensure informed consent, confidentiality, and full respect for participants’ rights. All participants were informed at registration that the project formed part of this research and that interactions during activities, as well as data from surveys and interviews, would be used for academic analysis. They were assured that all data would be anonymized (all names in this article are pseudonyms) and that they could withdraw at any time without consequence. At the first session, we reconfirmed their understanding of the research information and obtained signed consent forms. For visually impaired participants who could not read the form themselves, we read it aloud and recorded their oral consent.

7.5. Analytical Approach

Our analysis primarily drew on qualitative data from field observations and semi-structured interviews with visually impaired participants and students. We adopted a reflexive thematic analysis approach, informed by Braun and Clarke’s (2006, 2019) principles, while using Valentine’s (2020) tripartite framework of access intimacy—as feeling, as practice, and as political vision—as sensitizing concepts. After transcribing the interviews in full, both authors read and re-read the transcripts and observational notes to familiarize themselves with the material and to note initial interpretive observations and codes related to access, interdependence, vulnerability, fairness, and power relations.

We then met to discuss, compare and refine these preliminary codes, treating differences in interpretation as prompts for further reflexive dialogue rather than discrepancies to be resolved through consensus. Through this process, we developed an initial thematic map that linked participants’ accounts of collaboration, guidance, and emotional connection to broader questions of access intimacy and disability justice. In a second analytic cycle, we revisited the data with explicit attention to how each theme spoke to access intimacy as feeling, as practice, and as political vision, reorganizing codes and excerpts accordingly. This iterative movement between data and theory informed the structure of Section 8, in which we present three interrelated dimensions of access intimacy while foregrounding visually impaired participants’ experiential knowledge as the primary lens for interpretation. We remained reflexive about our own positionalities as researchers throughout this process.

8. Research Findings and Analysis

8.1. As Feeling: Emotional Dimensions of Access Needs

Access intimacy seeks to deepen human relationships by understanding disabled people’s needs as holistic human beings, rather than reducing accessibility to logistical conveniences (Mingus 2017). While mainstream institutions often prioritize logistical access, they frequently overlook emotional access needs. In this section, we examine whether, and in what ways, visually impaired participants and students developed deeper mutual understanding, and the kinds of new relational dynamics that emerged.

8.1.1. Like Friends

Albert, a visually impaired university student in his early twenties, joined the project because he enjoys playing board games “aggressively” and wanted to play alongside others rather than be “served.” His group was notably lively, with frequent laughter throughout the workshops. After one workshop, Albert showed anime images on his laptop, prompting animated discussions about shared interests among the student participants. In his interview, Albert attributed their rapport to their similar ages and shared interests, ranging from the trending Japanese character Chiikawa (ちいかわ) to favorite YouTubers. As a bus enthusiast who had previously been featured in online media, Albert was even recognized by a male group member during their first meeting—“He saw my clip and followed my IG!”—a moment he later described as exciting and serendipitous.

Albert explained that he actively follows social media trends and participates in discussion forums and follower groups to connect with others online. As a university student, he regards exposure to diverse digital content as beneficial. He elaborated: “As we don’t get visual information, we pick things up a bit more slowly. Therefore, I make a point to paying extra attention. I started following social media on purpose, and now it is simply part of my everyday habit.” His deliberate engagement with online culture provided him with plenty of conversation topics and helped him understand his fellow student groupmates’ humor.

He recounted moments in the workshops when he heard his group members chuckling softly. Although he could not see what was happening, he picked up cues from nearby interactions and correctly inferred that they were joking about things like university life and the activities happening around them, which enabled him to join in naturally. Albert emphasized staying attuned to his surroundings and proactively aligning with peer culture. These practices allowed him to understand group dynamics, anticipate reactions, and respond seamlessly, integrating into the group without needing to pause and explain his impairment.

Albert’s experience illustrates a pursuit not only of logistical but also of emotional access—not merely access to the games themselves, but to the peer group and to age-related forms of belonging. He sought friendship that went beyond impairment-based acceptance, desiring unhindered connection as a peer. Crucially, he consciously cultivated this emotional access rather than waiting passively to be “included.”

Ken, now in his sixties and formerly engaged in public education on visual impairment through an NGO, initially had only limited in-depth interaction with university students. As collaboration deepened, he and his groupmates began to chat casually during breaks, with students sharing their academic interests and university experiences and even asking more personal questions about the cause of his visual impairment. He was comfortable discussing these topics, and his group members reported that they felt they had become friends. On one occasion, his groupmate Sandy saw something amusing on her phone and instinctively turned to him, saying, “Take a look—isn’t this great?”, only realizing afterward that he could not see the screen. Sandy felt embarrassed and apologized, but Ken interpreted the moment positively, seeing this “forgetfulness” as a sign that Sandy treated him as a peer rather than continually foregrounding and “othering” his impairment.

8.1.2. Building Connections

These experiences of visually impaired participants show how access intimacy addresses emotional access needs, not just logistical participation. In this sense, disabled people seek access not only for recreation but also to reduce isolation and build meaningful connections with others (Romero-Fresco 2023). This resonates with Mingus’s (2017) emphasis that access intimacy creates opportunities for “joy, healing, and trust.”

Middle-aged Helen felt games could relieve stress but noted that mainstream options are largely mobile games relying heavily on visual elements. Although some visually impaired people can play such games using sound cues alone, she had severe low vision and felt this could not compare to playing face-to-face with other people: “When there’s someone to play with, it makes you feel a bit happier.” Helen recalled that, during their initial interactions, the students seemed shy—they appeared to want to talk to her but hesitated to speak. However, after several workshops, the group’s interaction became more relaxed and natural. Students began asking whether going out was inconvenient for her and how she usually cooked meals, and Helen was pleased to share her everyday experiences. For her, these deepening conversations and exchanges—fostering familiarity and mutual curiosity—were only made possible through face-to-face gaming.

Isabella, in her late fifties, shared that her most memorable experience was becoming more outgoing around young people. Having never attended university, she had long admired those well-educated university students. Their lively thinking and collaborative play made her feel more “integrated into society.” Their quick-witted “fast turns” in the games often left her laughing heartily. During one story-chaining game used to test their adapted rules—where participants earned points for developing unpredictable plots that incorporated randomly drawn words—a male student drew “chrysanthemum” (菊花). He wove it into his story using its slang meaning (referring to the “anus” in colloquial Chinese), and the group, including Isabella, burst into laughter. Isabella highlighted this kind of spontaneous, generationally inflected humor as something she rarely encountered outside interactions with youth.

Lucas, retired and in his seventies, described feeling revitalized when playing board games with young people. In a sound-identification game, he immediately recognized that sighted players did not have an inherent advantage, which sparked “a bit of competitive spirit, like I could actually compete with university students”—and winning brought a strong sense of “achievement.” Beyond the games themselves, Lucas appreciated the students’ thoughtful assistance throughout the activities. By contrast, he commented that his routine ophthalmology check-ups often felt demoralizing because of doctors’ apparent indifference, which sapped his motivation to attend. For someone with total blindness like Lucas, these visits represented ongoing monitoring rather than realistic prospects of cure, yet he still longed for human connection:

Please talk to us more—don’t just check our eyes and say, “Everything’s fine, go home and wait for the results.” Why would we even come in for that? Say something comforting like, “There’s no new progress right now, but here’s what we’d do if there were,” or “There are no suitable medications yet, but maintaining good habits, like drinking more water, can still support your overall health.” Show that you care. That kind of encouragement means everything to us. But when they say nothing, it leaves us feeling so lost and disappointed.

For profound vision loss such as Lucas’s, medical improvement may be unlikely; his routine visits instead seek acknowledgement and care “as a person,” grounded in trust in professionals. Yet his account suggests that clinicians often treated him primarily as a medical case rather than as a relational subject. This contrast underscores the importance of access intimacy: while technologies and services may address logistical or physical barriers, emotional intimacy—respect, empathy, and a sense of equality—often remains neglected. Within our project, collaborative board game play and cross-generational interaction helped meet Lucas’s need for connection, demonstrating how shared activity can bridge generational divides and foster emotional access.

8.2. As Practice: Co-Creating a “Space of Empowerment”

We observed two primary tendencies among students when they first adapted board games. First, they sought to enable visually impaired participants to play independently, without sighted assistance. Second, they aimed to achieve “fairness” by treating visually dependent game elements as disadvantages that needed to be corrected. Their initial strategies therefore emphasized “additive” modifications to compensate for perceived shortcomings in game components—for example, adding Braille directly onto cards to convey meaning, or including QR codes so visually impaired participants could scan card text independently using their phones. Alternatively, some students proposed “subtractive” changes, such as blindfolding all players to eliminate visual elements and thereby ensure equity. However, once they consulted their visually impaired group members, these solutions often proved less accessible than anticipated or misaligned with participants’ own priorities, particularly around differing conceptions of “fairness.” The following analysis examines these interactions in two parts.

8.2.1. Challenging Logistical “Independence”

Lucas proactively shared with the students that Braille has limited practical value in his everyday life: “Elevator Braille is flat and hard to feel, and by the time you find it, the elevator is already gone. It’s not that useful. Plus, Braille requires regular practice to retain… From what I know, many visually impaired people rarely use it.” Drawing on his lived experience, Lucas invited students to reconsider urban accessibility features that are celebrated in policy and design but frequently impractical in real-world use.

Ken drew upon his previous experience in public education on visual impairment to critically question the idea of accessibility as merely ticking boxes on a checklist. In group discussions about possible improvements, he patiently explained why completing such checklists—covering items like Braille labels and tactile guiding paths—still falls short, deepening students’ understanding of the diversity among visually impaired people and the problems with “one-size-fits-all” solutions:

Mainstream society tends to think that if there is Braille for you to read, they’ve done everything—or if there is a tactile guiding path, they’ve done everything. But that’s not the case at all, because the spectrum of visual impairment is very broad—from low vision, where you see a little, to very blurry vision, to total blindness—and the needs are very different. There is also background to consider. For example, if you are congenitally blind, you learn Braille from the beginning of school as your primary medium for learning. But for those of us who lose our sight later, nine out of ten have never learned it. So many things that the outside world assumes are “solved” just by putting these measures in place—it’s really not like that at all.

Conversations with students led by both Lucas and Ken offered not only concrete suggestions for improving the games, but also deeper insight into accessibility and ableism. In Ken’s group, students initially proposed adding QR codes to cards, imagining that visually impaired participants could then scan them independently. During testing, however, Ken identified a critical oversight: when he received a card, he had no tactile way to distinguish its front from its back or to orient it correctly for scanning. This “minor” detail exposed how a seemingly helpful solution remained grounded in sighted assumptions about handling objects. Sam, a student groupmate of Ken, later reflected: “Ken’s feedback was a real wake-up call—the collaboration on these details felt genuinely good, comfortable.” As Sam recalls, the group eventually co-developed a simple raised marker to indicate the card’s front. This iterative adjustment highlighted a key lesson: accessible design requires insight into users’ embodied processes, not just the attachment of assistive features. Through such reciprocal deliberation, the group moved from a one-sided helping impulse toward mutual co-creation and more equitable partnership. Mainstream society often frames disability as a “problem” to be fixed through institutional and technological interventions, obscuring the diversity and depth of disabled experience. This positioning prevents disabled people from being recognized as knowledge authorities in their own lives and reinforces modern values centered on “normalcy” and “independence” (Titchkosky and Michalko 2012). Recognizing disability as a shared human experience, rather than an exception, is essential for challenging ableism and neoliberal individualism.

8.2.2. Fairness Means We Can All Play Together

Students initially understood “fairness” as correcting the ways visually dependent game elements disadvantaged visually impaired participants. This orientation underpinned both their “additive” suggestions, which added tools to compensate for visual limitations, and their “subtractive” proposals, in which all players were blindfolded. During playtesting, students often provided intensive assistance by reading cards aloud or narrating game progress—for example, others’ reactions or the state of the board. This, however, frequently meant that helpers could not fully participate themselves and felt “very busy,” juggling their own gameplay and support—a situation that one visually impaired participant, Gloria, described as preventing them from fully enjoying the game.

Visually impaired participants conceptualized “fairness” differently. Several commented in interviews that universal blindfolding or eyes-closed play felt unnecessary. Ben, a visually impaired participant in this project who studies at university and often plays board games with sighted friends, felt the students were overly focused on equity: “They knew we were visually impaired, so it felt like… I wouldn’t call it labeling, but they adjusted everything and really emphasized fairness. I didn’t think it needed to be so deliberate.” For Ben, who is accustomed to blending seamlessly into casual games with sighted peers, this hyper-focus on “fairness” felt awkward. He wanted gaming to remain relaxed and enjoyable, and over-emphasizing his visual impairment undermined the lighthearted atmosphere he valued.

Albert, the previously mentioned visually impaired university student, took a game-specific approach to questions about blindfolds. His group adapted a logic-based board game, which led him to prioritize comprehension over vision. The original game included a clue where players drew pictures on paper for others to guess. Because visually impaired participants could not see, the group experimented with pressing harder on the paper to create tactile pen marks, which Albert could not reliably perceive. After repeated trials, they discovered that a type of craft “art foil”—a sheet that produces raised, embossed lines when drawn on firmly—allowed them to create images that sighted players could see and visually impaired players could feel. Albert commented, “I can’t see? No problem—we touch instead. It’s just a different medium: you see, we touch, but the outcome is the same. Of course, if you don’t understand it, that’s a comprehension issue… Even sighted players might not get it, so it’s not really about fairness.” For him, fairness meant shared challenge and comprehension, not identical sensory modes.

Older visually impaired participants expressed related views. Jack, in his sixties, argued that gaming relies on trust and that blindfolds felt unnecessarily “harsh.” He reframed fairness as ensuring that everyone has an equal opportunity to participate fully. His group adapted a game in which each player held small objects in one hand and drew a random card specifying which object to toss accurately and quickly, using only that hand. In its original form, the game required at least one sighted person to host and judge. The group imagined an ideal technological solution: a smartphone app that could read the card’s contents and verify each player’s toss accuracy and speed. Students initially framed this as enabling visually impaired participants to play independently. Jack, however, underscored a different dimension: such tools would also free sighted participants from hosting, allowing them to play as well. “Volunteers can host, sure,” he remarked, “but then you lose one player and burden another with work.” Although both students and Jack envisioned assistive technology, the students focused on visually impaired “independence,” whereas Jack emphasized fairness for sighted players whose participation was constrained by assisting roles.

Gloria, a visually impaired participant in Jack’s group, recalled a discussion about hosting. She noted that if the game dispensed with a dedicated host and instead relied on one sighted participant to read the name of each small object on the card, that sighted player would “already be one step behind. They need to finish reading before they can start playing, while others are faster. That wouldn’t be fair.” She therefore proposed introducing a three-second count after reading was completed before everyone tossed their objects. This ensured that the sighted player had sufficient reaction time. Like Jack, she prioritized ensuring that all participants could play on fair terms over achieving total independence from assistance. She focused on subtle rule adjustments that prevented anyone from losing playing opportunities because they were assisting her. These exchanges exemplify Valentine’s (2020) justice-based access, in which equity is negotiated relationally rather than imposed through standardized, rights-based adjustments.

Sighted individuals often default to helper or caregiver roles when interacting with visually impaired people, even in relaxed contexts such as board gaming, assuming responsibility for their care. While this goodwill and thoughtfulness deserve recognition, they can also make visually impaired participants feel burdensome. As Jack put it: “It’s help, not caregiving, not serving. True inclusion means equality. Fairness means we can all play together. A fun game is one where everyone can fully engage!” For visually impaired participants, accessibility was not only about their own participation but also about everyone’s access, including that of sighted players. This understanding embodies the bidirectional nature of access intimacy: not simply logistical “additions” or “subtractions,” but mutual respect, open sharing of experiences and perspectives, and collaborative redesign that yields solutions both groups find satisfying and equally participatory.

This close collaborative practice empowered not only the visually impaired participants but also the sighted student participants, teaching them how to relate more effectively to visually impaired friends and distinguishing “help” from “servicing.” Susan reflected after the project:

At our first meeting with visually impaired participants, we were so careful with our visually impaired partner—pulling out chairs, guiding him everywhere, constantly worried he’d bump into things, tiptoeing around him protectively. But later, our interactions felt much more natural. We stopped pulling chairs out especially for him and instead paid him ordinary, natural attention. He would sit down by himself; if he needed help, we would just say “left a bit” to remind him to move slightly left, and that was fine. Less stiffness, less tension—this was a change our whole group noticed.

The students’ experiences suggest that access intimacy often emerges when interactions move beyond overly ceremonial or anxious forms of accommodation. In some contexts, not helping—or helping more lightly—can align more closely with access intimacy than constant assistance. As familiarity grows, sighted participants learn to recognize capacities, discern when support is needed, and when to trust visually impaired partners to act independently. This nuanced understanding, rather than blanket caregiving, better respects actual needs and honors the emotional and psychological desire for equal treatment. It echoes Mingus’s (2011) observation that access intimacy does not require complete accessibility in every instance; instead, it flourishes in the shared, ongoing work of crafting access within an ableist world and in standing alongside one another in the face of inaccessibility.

8.3. As Political Actions: The Transformative Power of “Walking Together”

Many visually impaired participants actively taught students how to provide sighted guiding that felt safe and comfortable. Despite prior training—where students practiced leading blindfolded peers—guiding actual visually impaired individuals proved markedly different. We deliberately designed the project so that students would escort their visually impaired group members between off-campus pick-up points and on-campus classrooms, creating a space for enacting access intimacy. Sighted guiding, as several participants suggested, resembles a three-legged race or a tango: it demands reciprocal adjustment rather than a one-way “active–passive” dynamic. Although it might appear that students were “serving” their partners, visually impaired participants were often highly active in shaping the interaction.

Albert used these opportunities quite deliberately to teach group members how he navigates and to help them feel more confident while guiding. When one student nervously asked how he identified the correct escalator step or knew he was steady, Albert saw it as “a great chance for some public education on how visually impaired people use escalators.” He demonstrated his white cane techniques for detecting surfaces and reassured them: “We’re actually fine… Just relax, no big deal.” He explained that even if students forgot to announce road conditions, “we have other ways to know. We’re holding their hand, right? When you climb stairs, pause, or turn, we feel it, so we know. No need to worry.” Albert stressed that the guider’s emotional state was crucial: “The more nervous you get, the more nervous we get; if you’re calm, we’re calm.” Visually impaired people, he noted, can sense tension through a stiffened grip, which “makes us doubt you too,” thus increasing risk. This emotional contagion and mutual influence exemplify how intimately intertwined the guiding process is.

In conversations with students, Albert casually shared past guiding mishaps as teachable moments: “Many situations arise that students might not encounter in one or two tries. You can’t see it all, learn it all. Giving them this public education helps them guide better next time.” Even while immersed in playing and adapting board games, Albert consistently used everyday interactions as opportunities for public education about visually impaired lived experience. His actions reflect visually impaired participants’ agency in transforming everyday knowledge into shared understanding, strategically exposing vulnerability to foster deeper awareness of themselves and their community, and serving both educational and explicitly political aims.

Jack, who became fully blind just over a year before participating in our project, remains cautious when traveling and walks more slowly. He explained that with experienced volunteers he sometimes dispenses with his white cane, but with inexperienced students or strangers he immediately uses it alongside their guidance for safety:

I treat it as if I were walking unaccompanied. Of course, they don’t notice—I don’t want to hurt their feelings. I chat the whole way, like friends. I bring up topics to share with them: how canes work, different types and lengths, where measurements start…If there’s time, I elaborate. I also ask, “Is guiding me difficult? Do you feel uncomfortable? Are you walking slower than usual?” This helps them relax and feel more at ease.

While prioritizing his own safety, Jack remains attentive to others’ feelings, deliberately chatting “like friends” to ease tension and minimize error. This simple, practical strategy—casual conversation and interaction—shifts attention away from the pressure of guiding, relaxing both body and mind. Asking “Is guiding me difficult?” and encouraging a natural pace boosts the guider’s confidence. Both parties coordinate steps and movements, co-creating a way of walking that feels comfortable, safe, and mutually respectful. This process closely echoes Knight’s (2021) description of relational autonomy as negotiated decisions and jointly realized choices within interaction. Visually impaired participants reveal bodily and environmental vulnerability while simultaneously demonstrating relational agency through teaching and coordination; they maintain subjecthood as agents even as they receive assistance.

This process is not flawless, but it embodies the core of access intimacy—not the pursuit of perfect outcomes, but the cultivation of mutual respect, understanding, and closeness through interaction. In these exchanges, the visually impaired person’s vulnerability is acknowledged, as is the guider’s unease and inexperience. We often perceive only the assisted party as vulnerable, overlooking the fragility of those who provide help. Only when both parties’ vulnerabilities are seen and respected—not suppressed or ignored—can they, and their wider communities, forge tighter and more equal bonds. This mutual recognition gives access intimacy its transformative power as a political practice.

Jack also hopes that sighted guiding techniques will not remain exclusive to visually impaired people, viewing guiding as a versatile practice applicable to anyone with mobility challenges: “I taught my neighbor this method. Now he uses it to guide his elderly mother, and she’s much happier.” Friends have also told him they use it while dating. He emphasizes that guiding is fundamentally an intimate way of “walking together”: “It shouldn’t be called ‘blind guiding’ in the future, but rather a ‘walking together’ technique. It’s like how two close girlfriends might walk arm-in-arm, very buddy-like and close. Some people even prefer others to hold their shoulder to guide them.” This resonates with Mingus’s (2017) emphasis on access intimacy’s power to provide accompaniment and solidarity in an ableist world—overcoming access barriers without leaving people feeling alone.

As Valentine (2020) argues, people’s self-understanding is not fragmented or purely individual but fundamentally relational and intersubjective, making accessibility deeply tied to our ways of relating and belonging. Access intimacy, as an ongoing relational practice, prompts a reevaluation of intersubjectivity, our shared vulnerability from birth, and the unequal power dynamics embedded in any relationship. To position disabled people as epistemic subjects of their own experiences, we must dismantle ableist cognitive structures: non-disabled individuals must relinquish assumptions of experiential superiority and learn to listen with empathy, while disabled people may choose to share vulnerability with dignity, transforming personal experience into political practice. In modern societies that idealize independence and self-sufficiency, “vulnerability” is often seen as a defect to be hidden, yet both physical and emotional fragility are universal human conditions. Only by acknowledging our own and others’ vulnerability can relationships approach genuine intimacy and equality. As Romero-Fresco (2023) notes, when people expose vulnerability in interaction, they simultaneously demonstrate trust and responsibility; this mutual openness and understanding holds transformative potential, turning access intimacy into political action that challenges oppression, restructures relationships, and reconfigures power.

8.4. Student Survey: Perceived Learning and Inclusion

While our analysis primarily draws on qualitative interviews and observations, the student survey provides complementary descriptive insights into how participants perceived their learning and engagement in the project. All 35 students completed a post-project online survey that combined Likert-type items and open-ended questions about their collaboration with visually impaired adults, perceived skills gained, and understandings of inclusion and access. Across the survey, almost all students agreed or strongly agreed that they had developed a deeper understanding of visually impaired people and their everyday experiences after the project. Most reported gains in communication skills, creative problem-solving, and empathy, frequently describing how they learned to adjust explanations, game rules, and spatial navigation practices to make play more accessible. Many responses also highlighted a shift from imagining “helping” as a one-directional act to recognizing visually impaired participants as experts who contributed crucial ideas to game design, thereby reframing interdependence as mutual rather than deficit-based. Students further described increased confidence in using guiding techniques and basic audio description in future professional encounters (for example, in nursing, social work, or physiotherapy), and several explicitly connected the project to a more justice-oriented understanding of “inclusion” that goes beyond physical access to relational recognition and equal participation. A summary of the main survey findings is presented in

Table 1. Summary of student post-project survey (n = 35).

Domain	Item/Category	n (%)
Understanding of visually impaired people	Agree/strongly agree that they gained a deeper understanding of visually impaired people and their everyday experiences	33 (94%)
Skills/knowledge gained (multiple response)	Communication skills	30 (86%)
	Creative thinking/problem-solving	28 (80%)
	Empathy toward different social groups	32 (91%)
Personal growth (multiple response)	Increased empathy	32 (91%)
	Improved teamwork	27 (77%)
	Stimulated creativity/innovation	25 (71%)
Impact on social inclusion	Project is “helpful” or “very helpful” for promoting social inclusion	34 (97%)
Future professional implications	Expect experience to help in future work with visually impaired people	29 (83%)

.

9. Limitations and Reflections on Inclusive Research

This study has several limitations that also invite reflection on how far it enacts the principles of inclusive research. Drawing on Walmsley and Johnson’s (2003) distinction between research on, with, and by disabled people, our project has moved towards research with and for visually impaired participants but does not fully reach research by them. Within the collaborative board-game workshops, visually impaired adults played a central role as knowledge producers: they identified barriers, proposed solutions, and critically redefined notions such as fairness, independence, and support. At the same time, key aspects of the research process remained researcher-led. The initial formulation of research questions, the overall design of the project, and the analytic framing were primarily developed by the authors, rather than being co-designed with visually impaired participants from the outset.

In terms of data analysis and writing, the present article was authored solely by the two sighted researchers. Visually impaired participants did not take part in formal coding workshops, co-analysis meetings, or co-authorship, largely due to time constraints, funding limitations, and the institutional timelines of the project. From the perspective of inclusive research, this represents a significant constraint: while participants’ narratives and interpretations are foregrounded in the findings, they were not directly involved in deciding which themes to prioritize or how to theorize their experiences. Future research could address this by inviting a small group of visually impaired co-researchers to join analytic discussions, co-interpret emerging themes, and potentially share authorship or lead community-facing reports.

Participant involvement in dissemination was also limited. Although we shared preliminary reflections informally with NGO partners and participants during and after the workshops, we did not yet organize dedicated feedback sessions where visually impaired collaborators could respond to the analysis, reshape key messages, or co-design strategies for sharing findings with wider communities. Walmsley and Johnson (2003) emphasize that inclusive research should ultimately serve disabled people’s interests and promote social change. In future iterations of this work, we aim to build in more structured opportunities for participants to guide dissemination plans—for example, through follow-up meetings, accessible summary reports, or co-presentations with visually impaired co-researchers in academic and community forums.

There are also methodological limitations related to sampling and data sources. Only three of the thirty-five student participants were able to take part in in-depth interviews, primarily because the interview period coincided with examination and assessment deadlines. As a result, the qualitative insights into students’ perspectives are based on a small group who were particularly engaged and motivated, which may not fully represent the broader range of student experiences. Although the post-project survey, completed by all 35 students, provides useful descriptive context, it cannot substitute for the depth and nuance of additional interviews or focus groups. Future studies could schedule data collection outside peak assessment periods, offer multiple interview formats (such as online or small-group discussions), and allocate more time and resources for recruiting student participants as co-researchers rather than primarily as respondents.

Although the present article does not incorporate formal member-checking or co-authored reflections from visually impaired participants, the project has continued beyond the period reported here. In follow-up sessions, some visually impaired collaborators took on facilitative roles, hosting gameplay sessions in which new visually impaired participants and university students tried the adapted board games. In addition, the collaborative model piloted in this study has been extended into a subsequent service-learning program for our university students, providing an ongoing context in which access intimacy and inclusive research practices can be further developed, refined, and embedded in everyday teaching and community engagement.

10. Conclusions

This study set out to examine how visually impaired adults and university students co-create access intimacy as feeling, as practice, and as political vision within a collaborative board-game project. As feeling, our analysis has shown how participants moved beyond mere logistical accessibility to cultivate emotional access and peer-like relationships that counteracted isolation and paternalistic treatment. As practice and political vision, the project foregrounded negotiations around guidance, independence, fairness, and vulnerability that reimagined access as a shared ethical and political responsibility rather than a purely technical accommodation.

Placing access intimacy at the theoretical core, the study demonstrates that accessibility exceeds technical aids or one-way assistance. It emerges as a relational practice grounded in mutual understanding, trust, and shared vulnerability. Our findings illustrate how mainstream notions of “independence” and “fairness”—often operationalized through additive tools such as Braille cards or subtractive measures such as universal blindfolds—can reproduce ableist individualism by prioritizing logistical fixes over embodied realities.

In contrast, access intimacy foregrounds interdependence and vulnerability as ethical-political opportunities for reconfiguring equality. Across gameplay, discussion, and sighted guiding, participants practiced coordination, careful listening, and mutual “holding.” Collaborative game design enabled visually impaired participants to experience emotional access by fostering friendship, recognition, and belonging beyond logistical accessibility. Negotiation around “independence” and “fairness” generated forms of transformative empowerment for both visually impaired and sighted participants, reframing interdependence as strength. Students worked through initial nervousness about guiding, while visually impaired individuals such as Albert and Jack actively taught techniques and shared experiential knowledge, transforming “help” into a more reciprocal “tango.” In these encounters, the vulnerabilities of both groups—students’ inexperience and visually impaired participants’ access needs—were acknowledged and respected, enabling the formation of transformative relationships. This process not only affirmed visually impaired participants as knowledge producers, but also prompted sighted students to question the boundaries of helping, enacting access intimacy as political practice.

Echoing Echoing Mingus (2011, 2017), Valentine (2020), and Romero-Fresco (2023), these interactions did not depend on perfectly accessible environments; rather, they flourished through the shared work of creating access within an ableist world and standing alongside one another in the face of inaccessibility. By challenging paternalistic assumptions—for example, the presumption in ethics review processes that adults with visual impairments are unable to provide informed consent or manage their own mobility—the project demonstrates an inclusive research approach that amplifies disabled voices, interrogates power imbalances, and reimagines human connection.

Ultimately, access intimacy invites us to practice social justice relationally: to acknowledge universal vulnerability, to pursue justice through interdependence, and to rediscover accessibility’s possibilities in accompaniment and mutual reliance. Situated in Hong Kong, this research shows how collaborative board game design can enact access intimacy as a learnable relational skill, while extending debates on access intimacy, relational vulnerability, and inclusive research by centering visually impaired individuals.

Beyond this specific project, the relational practices that emerged point to the broader transferability of access intimacy as a guiding principle for other educational, community, and professional contexts. The use of co-created activities—here, collaborative board-game design—as a medium for shared experimentation suggests that similar formats, such as participatory art, storytelling, or service co-design, can be adapted in university courses, NGO programs, and professional training to cultivate justice-oriented understandings of access. The concrete strategies developed by participants—for instance, students deliberately relinquishing the role of expert helper, visually impaired adults redefining fairness through negotiated adaptations, and pairs experimenting with reciprocal guiding—offer portable ways of organizing encounters in which disabled people’s experiential knowledge leads design, and non-disabled participants practice access intimacy through sustained listening, co-creation, and shared risk-taking. Together, these possibilities underline access intimacy’s potential as a practical horizon for reimagining everyday relations between disabled and non-disabled people.

11. Coda

In closing, we highlight the game adaptation most favored by visually impaired participants. One group creatively combined two source games into a unified experience. The first component involved guessing objects by sound, a sensory mode that felt familiar and drew on visually impaired participants’ primary perceptual strengths. However, the original game’s plastic miniatures were confusing for many of them. For example, one square-shaped item was remade as a tiny biscuit-like object, and another fan-shaped item was meant to represent a shell, yet their representational intent could not be readily inferred haptically. Participants who had lost sight later in life could draw on earlier visual memories when interpreting these miniatures. By contrast, for participants who had been blind since birth, such replicas did not correspond to any prior tactile knowledge, making it difficult to name or distinguish the objects. In this project, replacing the original game’s artificial objects with everyday items that participants regularly encounter through touch proved to be a highly effective adaptation, making the game immediately more accessible and meaningful for visually impaired players, especially those who are congenitally blind.

The second component extended the guessing game into a story-chaining activity that demanded imagination and sustained interaction. Several visually impaired participants emphasized that this hybrid structure significantly enhanced playability: rather than ending abruptly after a single round, the game invited collective exploration and prolonged engagement. This adaptation exemplifies the study’s three analytical dimensions: as feeling, through sensory familiarity and shared joy; as practice, through collaborative refinement responsive to lived realities; and as political vision, through reimagining accessibility via interdependence rather than through narrowly conceived, ableist “fixes.” In this sense, the adapted game offers a concrete illustration of access intimacy’s transformative potential.