Usability, Accessibility and Social Entanglements in Advanced Tool Use by Vision Impaired Graduate Students

E. J. Edwards Isabela Figueira Joshua Garcia + 4 lainnya

11 Mei 2024

Scholars have investigated numerous barriers to accessible software development tools and processes for Blind and Low Vision (BLV) developers. However, the research community has yet to study the accessibility of software development meetings, which are known to play a crucial role in software development practice. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 26 BLV software professionals about software development meeting accessibility. We found four key themes related to in-person and remote software development meetings: (1) participants observed that certain meeting activities and software tools used in meetings were inaccessible, (2) participants performed additional labor in order to make meetings accessible, (3) participants avoided disclosing their disability during meetings due to fear of career repercussions, (4) participants suggested technical, social and organizational solutions for accessible meetings, including developing their own solutions. We suggest recommendations and design implications for future accessible software development meetings including technical and policy-driven solutions.

Nayeri Jacobo Kristen Shinohara Michael J. McQuaid

6 Mei 2021

Despite efforts to support students with disabilities in higher education, few continue to pursue doctoral degrees in computing. We conducted an interview study with 12 blind and low vision, and 7 deaf and hard of hearing current and former doctoral students in computing to understand how graduate students adjust to inaccessibility and ineffective accommodations. We asked participants how they worked around inaccessibility, managed ineffective accommodations, and advocated for tools and services. Employing a lens of ableism in our analysis, we found that participants’ extra effort to address accessibility gaps gave rise to a burden of survival, which they sustained to meet expectations of graduate-level productivity. We recommend equitable solutions that acknowledge taken-for-granted workarounds and that actively address inaccessibility in the graduate school context.

Kathleen Garrity Shakila Cherise S. Joyner Yea-Seul Kim + 2 lainnya

27 April 2022

Data visualizations are now widely used across many disciplines. However, many of them are not easily accessible for visually impaired people. In this work, we use three-staged mixed methods to understand the current practice of accessible visualization design for visually impaired people. We analyzed 95 visualizations from various venues to inspect how they are made inaccessible. To understand the rationale and context behind the design choices, we also conducted surveys with 144 practitioners in the U.S. and follow-up interviews with ten selected survey participants. Our findings include the difficulties of handling modern complex and interactive visualizations and the lack of accessibility support from visualization tools in addition to personal and organizational factors making it challenging to perform accessible design practices.

Leah Findlater Kelly Avery Mack Jon E. Froehlich + 3 lainnya

12 Januari 2021

Accessibility research has grown substantially in the past few decades, yet there has been no literature review of the field. To understand current and historical trends, we created and analyzed a dataset of accessibility papers appearing at CHI and ASSETS since ASSETS’ founding in 1994. We qualitatively coded areas of focus and methodological decisions for the past 10 years (2010-2019, N=506 papers), and analyzed paper counts and keywords over the full 26 years (N=836 papers). Our findings highlight areas that have received disproportionate attention and those that are underserved—for example, over 43% of papers in the past 10 years are on accessibility for blind and low vision people. We also capture common study characteristics, such as the roles of disabled and nondisabled participants as well as sample sizes (e.g., a median of 13 for participant groups with disabilities and older adults). We close by critically reflecting on gaps in the literature and offering guidance for future work in the field.

Qiwen Zhao Vaishnavi Mande Matt Huenerfauth + 4 lainnya

26 Oktober 2020

With an increasing demand for computing professionals with skills in accessibility, it is important for university faculty to select effective methods for educating computing students about barriers faced by users with disabilities and approaches to improving accessibility. While some prior work had evaluated accessibility educational interventions, many prior studies have consisted of firsthand reports from faculty or short-term evaluations. This paper reports on the results of a systematic evaluation of methods for teaching accessibility from a longitudinal study across 29 sections of a human-computer interaction course (required for students in a computing degree program), as taught by 10 distinct professors, throughout four years, with over 400 students. A control condition (course without accessibility content) was compared to four intervention conditions: week of lectures on accessibility, team design project requiring some accessibility consideration, interaction with someone with a disability, and collaboration with a team member with a disability. Comparing survey data immediately before and after the course, we found that the Lectures, Projects, and Interaction conditions were effective in increasing students' likelihood to consider people with disabilities on a design scenario, awareness of accessibility barriers, and knowledge of technical approaches for improving accessibility - with students in the Team Member condition having higher scores on the final measure only. However, comparing survey responses from students immediately before the course and from approximately 2 years later, almost no significant gains were observed, suggesting that interventions within a single course are insufficient for producing long-term changes in measures of students’ accessibility learning. This study contributes to empirical knowledge to inform university faculty in selecting effective methods for teaching accessibility, and it motivates further research on how to achieve long-term changes in accessibility knowledge, e.g. by reinforcing accessibility throughout a degree program.