Investigating the Accessibility of Crowdwork Tasks on Mechanical Turk

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.

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.

K. Ma Yochai Eisenberg Judy L Shanley + 8 lainnya

11 Mei 2024

Despite decades of effort, pedestrian infrastructure in cities continues to be unsafe or inaccessible to people with disabilities. In this paper, we examine the potential of community-driven digital civics to assess sidewalk accessibility through a deployment study of an open-source crowdsourcing tool called Project Sidewalk. We explore Project Sidewalk’s potential as a platform for civic learning and service. Specifically, we assess its effectiveness as a tool for community members to learn about human mobility, urban planning, and accessibility advocacy. Our findings demonstrate that community-driven digital civics can support accessibility advocacy and education, raise community awareness, and drive pro-social behavioral change. We also outline key considerations for deploying digital civic tools in future community-led accessibility initiatives.

Jaylin Herskovitz Robin Brewer Rahaf Alharbi + 2 lainnya

13 Agustus 2024

Blind people use artificial intelligence-enabled visual assistance technologies (AI VAT) to gain visual access in their everyday lives, but these technologies are embedded with errors that may be difficult to verify non-visually. Previous studies have primarily explored sighted users' understanding of AI output and created vision-dependent explainable AI (XAI) features. We extend this body of literature by conducting an in-depth qualitative study with 26 blind people to understand their verification experiences and preferences. We begin by describing errors blind people encounter, highlighting how AI VAT fails to support complex document layouts, diverse languages, and cultural artifacts. We then illuminate how blind people make sense of AI through experimenting with AI VAT, employing non-visual skills, strategically including sighted people, and cross-referencing with other devices. Participants provided detailed opportunities for designing accessible XAI, such as affordances to support contestation. Informed by disability studies framework of misfitting and fitting, we unpacked harmful assumptions with AI VAT, underscoring the importance of celebrating disabled ways of knowing. Lastly, we offer practical takeaways for Responsible AI practice to push the field of accessible XAI forward.

Kyungjun Lee Rie Kamikubo Hernisa Kacorri

9 Maret 2023

To ensure that AI-infused systems work for disabled people, we need to bring accessibility datasets sourced from this community in the development lifecycle. However, there are many ethical and privacy concerns limiting greater data inclusion, making such datasets not readily available. We present a pair of studies where 13 blind participants engage in data capturing activities and reflect with and without probing on various factors that influence their decision to share their data via an AI dataset. We see how different factors influence blind participants’ willingness to share study data as they assess risk-benefit tradeoffs. The majority support sharing of their data to improve technology but also express concerns over commercial use, associated metadata, and the lack of transparency about the impact of their data. These insights have implications for the development of responsible practices for stewarding accessibility datasets, and can contribute to broader discussions in this area.