The paper “Social Play Between Deaf and Hard of Hearing Children and Hearing Peers: Learning from Children and School Ecosystems”, co-authored by Jing Zhao and Isabel Neto (both LASIGE researchers), and Michaela Okosi, Paulo Vaz de Carvalho, and Hugo Nicolau, has been accepted and presented at the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2026), a top-ranked venue (CORE A*), which took place in Barcelona, Spain, from April 13 to 17, 2026.

In this paper, the authors highlight the barriers and challenges that Deaf, Hard of Hearing, and hearing children often face during social play in school playgrounds. Through interviews with educators and children at a Partially Bilingual School, alongside a seven-week observation of a school playground at a Full Bilingual School, the researchers found that social play is deeply influenced by school culture, peer culture, and child agency. Based on these insights, the authors propose the concept of contextualized social play technology and provide design guidelines to inform the development of future inclusive play technologies.

It is available here and contributed to LASIGE’s strong presence at CHI 2026.