Reconfiguration of Ability: An Autoethnography of LLM-Mediated Development by a Developer with Severe Physical Disability

Author's camera-ready version (accepted manuscript) of a paper to appear in The 28th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '26), October 25–28, 2026, Vila Nova de Gaia, Portugal. The version of record will appear in the ACM Digital Library at https://doi.org/10.1145/3797867.3828990.

What does it mean to be a "developer" when one cannot type, speak, or move one's limbs? This paper presents an autoethnographic inquiry into how the concept of ability is reconfigured through collaboration between a person with severe physical disability and large language models (LLMs). The author operates a tablet exclusively through a single head-mounted switch. Yet through natural-language-driven development ("vibe coding"), the author iterated through eleven versions of a personalized communication model—including building an auxiliary data-synthesis model—as part of Project VOICE, published 23 AI models on Hugging Face, and led a 10-person team. Drawing on contemporaneous development logs and first-person reflective narratives, the paper introduces the concept of reconfiguration of ability: neither the "restoration" of function nor the "removal" of barriers, but a continuous reshaping of what counts as ability through the connection between humans and technology. The paper grounds the concept in three constitutive features—persistence of impairment, non-removal of barriers, and redefinition of the ability itself—distinguishes it from compensation and accommodation, and derives implications for the design of assistive and development technologies.