Understanding the Microtask Crowdsourcing Experience for Workers with Disabilities: A Comparative View

Microtask crowdsourcing holds great potential as an employment opportunity with the flexibility and anonymity that individuals with disability may require. Though prior research has explored the accessibility of crowd work, the lived crowd work experiences of the broader community of workers with disability are still largely under-explored, especially when it comes to how their experiences are similar to or different from the experiences of workers without disability. In this work, we aim to obtain a deeper understanding of the microtask crowdsourcing experience for people with disabilities, especially regarding their financial and social experiences of participating in crowd work, along with the benefits and challenges that they encounter through this work. Specifically, we first surveyed 1,200 crowd workers both with and without disability about their experiences using the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform, and the differences we found inspired the design of a follow-up survey to gain greater understanding of the crowd work experience for workers with disability. Our findings reveal that workers with disability receive unique benefits from performing crowd work, such as a greater sense of purpose, but also encounter many challenges, such as completing tasks on time and earning a livable wage, causing them to turn to online communities for assistance. Although many of the challenges they face are not unique to crowd workers with disability, workers with disability may be disproportionately impacted by these challenges. From our findings, we provide implications for crowd platforms, as well as the gig economy as a whole, that seek to promote greater consideration of workers with a diverse range of conditions to create a more valuable work experience for them.