"Do You Want Me to Participate or Not?": Investigating the Accessibility of Software Development Meetings for Blind and Low Vision Professionals

Scott Reitherman Michael Lawrence Barnett Maulishree Pandey + 2 lainnya

22 Oktober 2022

COVID-19 accelerated the trend toward remote software development, increasing the need for tightly-coupled synchronous collaboration. Existing tools and practices impose high coordination overhead on blind or visually impaired (BVI) developers, impeding their abilities to collaborate effectively, compromising their agency, and limiting their contribution. To make remote collaboration more accessible, we created CodeWalk, a set of features added to Microsoft’s Live Share VS Code extension, for synchronous code review and refactoring. We chose design criteria to ease the coordination burden felt by BVI developers by conveying sighted colleagues’ navigation and edit actions via sound effects and speech. We evaluated our design in a within-subjects experiment with 10 BVI developers. Our results show that CodeWalk streamlines the dialogue required to refer to shared workspace locations, enabling participants to spend more time contributing to coding tasks. This design offers a path towards enabling BVI and sighted developers to collaborate on more equal terms.

Rahaf Alharbi Karl Henderson John Tang

19 April 2023

Workplaces around the globe are beginning to rapidly adopt hybrid meetings to conduct, plan, and organize their work. While previous literature explores the benefits and drawbacks of hybrid meetings, the experiences of professionals with disabilities are largely missing. With an orientation towards an accessible future of work, we interviewed 21 professionals with disabilities to unpack the accessibility barriers, opportunities, and conflicts of hybrid meetings. We highlight the creative ways professionals with disabilities developed workarounds and repairs to these accessibility tensions. Our paper expands the understanding of accessibility in hybrid meetings by identifying how the visibility of access labor may be affected by being in the room together with other colleagues or joining remotely. We also observed how hybrid configurations can require navigating accessibility conflicts specific to the location site of each participant. Building from our analysis, we offer practical suggestions and design directions to make hybrid meetings accessible.

S. Malek Ziyao He Syed Fatiul Huq + 1 lainnya

19 April 2023

It is crucial to make software, with its ever-growing influence on everyday lives, accessible to all, including people with disabilities. Despite promoting software accessibility through government regulations, development guidelines, tools and frameworks, investigations reveal a marketplace of inaccessible web and mobile applications. To better understand the limitations of contemporary software industry in adopting accessibility practices, it is necessary to construct a holistic view that combines the perspectives of software practitioners, stakeholders and end users. In this paper, we collect 637 conversations from Twitter to synthesize and qualitatively analyze discussions posted about software accessibility. Our findings observe an active community that provides feedback on inaccessible software, shares personal accounts of development practices and advocates for inclusivity. By perceiving software accessibility from process, profession and people viewpoints, we present current conventions, challenges and possible resolutions with four emergent themes: cost and incentives, awareness and advocacy, technology and resources, and integration and inclusion.

Murtaza Tamjeed Dymen A. Barkins Kristen Shinohara + 1 lainnya

7 November 2022

Despite increasing work investigating the accessibility of research tools, most accessibility research has traditionally focused on popular, mainstream, or web technologies. We investigated barriers and workarounds blind and low vision doctoral students in computing-intensive disciplines experienced and engaged, respectively, when using advanced technical tools for research tasks. We conducted an observation and interview study with eight current and former Ph.D. students, closely analyzing the accessibility of specific tasks. Our findings contextualize how inaccessible tools complicate research tasks, adding time and effort, and exacerbating social entanglements in collaborative relationships. This work contributes empirical data that extricates how in/accessibility of advanced technical tools used in research influences productivity and collegial efforts.

Heather Moses Weishi Shi Daniel E. Krutz + 2 lainnya

26 September 2023

Creating accessible software is imperative for making software inclusive for all users.Unfortunately, the topic of accessibility is frequently excluded from computing education, leading to scenarios where students are unaware of either how to develop accessible software or see the need to create it. To address this challenge, we have created a set of educational labs that are systematically designed to not only inform students about fundamental topics in producing accessible software but also demonstrate its importance. Over the previous year, these labs were included in several Computer Science 2 offerings at the Rochester Institute of Technology, comprising a total of 500 student participants. This article discusses instructional observations from these offerings, some of which include the following: (i) many of the research findings from previous efforts remain true with the larger, more diverse evaluation; (ii) our created material and format reduced students’ belief that creating accessible software was difficult in relation to the baseline,; (iii) we observed that our created material and format benefited student opinion that creating accessible software is important, and (iv) computing majors may not be uniformly impacted by experiential educational accessibility material. The educational labs are publicly available on the project website (https://all.rit.edu).