Beyond the Manual: Mapping Peer-Generated Content about Wheelchair Care and Adaptation on YouTube

For millions of people worldwide, wheelchairs are not just medical devices but an essential part of their body that enables mobility, independence, and participation in social life [13, 83]. Therefore, it is of paramount importance that the chair is adequately fit to users’ bodies, and properly maintained and repaired in a timely manner during use [4, 84]. However, accessing formal service is often impeded by significant system and financial barriers, even in high-income countries [31, 56, 85]. Faced with these limitations, people with disabilities (PwDs) and their families often perform their own routine maintenance, repairs [22, 80], and a wide spectrum of Do-It-Yourself (DIY) customizations [11, 35, 64]. These user-led efforts to care for assistive technology (AT) are a growing area of interest in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI).

 

Yet, much of the existing research interest has focused on DIY AT, typically examined through either a retrospective or artifact-centric lens. The former was often conducted within controlled or researcher-facilitated contexts, such as interviews or workshops [35, 57], while the latter centered on finished models in open repositories (e.g., Thingiverse) [11]. Both approaches offer limited access to the embodied and temporal dimensions of these DIY works. Furthermore, fewer studies have looked at the repair or maintenance aspect of AT. Those that do tend to default to top-down methods, deriving user needs through professional services, such as surveys [85] or repair shop records [36]. Consequently, far less is known about how all these practices ranging from maintenance to DIY unfold in everyday life, resulting in a lack of insight into the strategies users employ at home. For instance, how adaptations or repairs are improvised under constraints, shared informally, or shaped by at-hand materials and personal environment, especially during moments when users cannot or choose not to access professional vendors. Understanding such “in the wild” work is crucial for capturing potential user needs that rarely surface in formal services or lab-based studies [14, 27].

 

Meanwhile, video-sharing platforms like YouTube have become de facto repositories where such "in-the-wild" practices are documented and exchanged, offering a rare window into PwDs’ needs in real life and what they choose to make visible to others. Prior HCI and disability studies have long leveraged online videos to understand PwDs’ technology use and community practices [6], including content creators from Deaf and Hard of Hearing people [12] to people with visual impairments [72, 73, 74].

 

However, little research has adopted this approach to examine wheelchair users, nor has there been a systematic investigation into the content of wheelchair care and adaptation videos created by them. As a result, their everyday practices, such as repair, maintenance, and adaptation remain underexplored. Therefore, to address these gaps, this study asks the following research questions (RQs):

To answer these questions, we conducted a content analysis of 290 publicly available YouTube videos focused on wheelchair repair, maintenance, and customization. By combining thematic coding of video content and 800 comments with statistical models of engagement metrics, we mapped the landscape of these peer-generated videos, uncovering a rich tapestry of content and community engagement.

This research makes four primary contributions. (1) First, we provide a systematic, empirical account of the maintenance, repair, and adaptation practice wheelchair users documented on YouTube. Beyond cataloging seven topics, our analysis reveals how these practices are distributed, and how creators use five distinct delivery styles to communicate their videos, resulting in the analysis of four motivations that underpin content creation. (2) Second, we identify nine key user needs that motivate these practices, from obtaining practical skills and supporting daily tasks, to enhancing mobility, enabling leisure, and expressing identity. Articulating these needs surfaces a variety of constraints and aspirations shaping wheelchair use, offering actionable guidance for improving the design of AT. (3) Third, we also introduce the Ladder of DIY Adaptation, a five-rung conceptual model that categorizes acts of making from simple accessorizing and bricolage (making-do with whatever is at hand) to full custom builds. This model provides a structured vocabulary to understand the breadth of DIY-AT practices and supports future design-oriented research. (4) Fourth, we characterize viewers’ reception finding that styling content draws wide “blockbuster” reach, while “custom-built chair” videos function as community hubs with dense discussion. We further mapped the comment exchanges into three layered patterns of direct feedback, personal reflections, and tangential topics. This characterization shows that video platforms function not only as knowledge repositories but also as socio-technical infrastructures where peer exchange strengthens community resilience and solidarity.

 

In the discussion, we reflect on the opportunities and ethical cautions of using YouTube as a research site. Ultimately, we argue that HCI must expand its focus beyond high-tech tools to support the diverse practices of DIY-AT for wheelchairs, not only major modifications but also light fabrication with re-purposing existing materials, grounding future design in solidarity with these communities. Moreover, the analytical lenses introduced in this work, from topic mapping to the Ladder of DIY Adaptation, and comment-layer analysis, offer transferable methodological tools for studying user-led AT practices across other disability communities. Many ATs, from white canes to hearing aids to communication apps, similarly rely on users’ own troubleshooting and peer knowledge exchange, positioning our study as a foundation for future HCI and accessibility research in other disability domains.