People with limited mobility often use multiple devices when interacting with computing systems, but little is known about the impact these multi-modal configurations have on daily computing use. A deeper understanding of the practices, preferences, obstacles, and workarounds associated with accessible multi-modal input can uncover opportunities to create more accessible computer applications and hardware. We explored how people with limited mobility use multi-modality through a three-part investigation grounded in the context of video games. First, we surveyed 43 people to learn about their preferred devices and configurations. Next, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 14 participants to understand their experiences and challenges with using, configuring, and discovering input setups. Lastly, we performed a systematic review of 74 YouTube videos to illustrate and categorize input setups and adaptations in-situ. We conclude with a discussion on how our findings can inform future accessibility research for current and emerging computing technologies.

Virtual reality (VR) leverages human sight, hearing and touch senses to convey virtual experiences. For d/Deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) people, information conveyed through sound may not be accessible. To help with future design of accessible VR sound representations for DHH users, this paper contributes a consistent language and structure for representing sounds in VR. Using two studies, we report on the design and evaluation of a novel taxonomy for VR sounds. Study 1 included interviews with 10 VR sound designers to develop our taxonomy along two dimensions: sound source and intent. To evaluate this taxonomy, we conducted another study (Study 2) where eight HCI researchers used our taxonomy to document sounds in 33 VR apps. We found that our taxonomy was able to successfully categorize nearly all sounds (265/267) in these apps. We also uncovered additional insights for designing accessible visual and haptic-based sound substitutes for DHH users.

Virtual reality (VR) leverages sight, hearing, and touch senses to convey virtual experiences. For d/Deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) people, however, information conveyed through sound may not be accessible. While prior work has explored making every day sounds accessible to DHH users, the context of VR is, as yet, unexplored. In this paper, we provide a first comprehensive investigation of sound accessibility in VR. Our primary contributions include a design space for developing visual and haptic substitutes of VR sounds to support DHH users and prototypes illustrating several points within the design space. We also characterize sound accessibility in commonly used VR apps and discuss findings from early evaluations of our prototypes with 11 DHH users and 4 VR developers.

In this work, we sought to understand the experiences and disability disclosure preferences of adults with and without disabilities who have dated online. Our 91 survey respondents expressed varying opinions about the need for potential partners to disclose disability status when online dating depending on the nature or perceived severity, with "visible" disabilities carrying a higher expectation of upfront disclosure than "invisible" disabilities. Many disabled respondents also described proactively disclosing as a technique to filter potential connections. Our findings suggest that individuals with disabilities must perform additional labor and navigate complex group norms in pursuit of personal connection. We advocate that the social computing research community consider how these processes are driven by both societal expectation and the constraints of online dating platforms. We then offer design considerations and open questions as a means to extend social computing study at the intersection of online dating and disability studies.

The tracking of developmental milestones in young children is an important public health goal for ensuring early detection and treatment for developmental delay. While numerous paper-based and web-based solutions are available for tracking milestones, many busy parents often forget to enter information on a regular basis. To help address this need, we have developed an interactive system called @BabySteps for allowing parents who use Twitter to track and respond to tweets about developmental milestones using a special hashtag syntax. Parent responses are parsed automatically and written into a central database that can be accessed via the web. We deployed @BabySteps with 14 parents over a 3-week period and found that parents were able to learn how to use the system to track their children's progress, with some using it to communicate with other parents. The study helped to identify a number of ways to improve the approach, including simplifying the hashtag syntax, allowing for private responses via direct messaging, and improving the social component. We provide a discussion of lessons learned and suggestions for the design of interactive public health systems.

A gap between the academic human-computer interaction community and the game development industry has led to games not being as thoroughly influenced by accessibility standards as most other facets of information and communication technology. As a result, individuals with disabilities are unable to fully, if at all, engage with many commercial games. This paper presents the findings of a pair of complementary empirical studies intended to understand the current state of game accessibility in a grounded, real-world context and identify issues and barriers. The first study involved an online survey of 55 gamers with disabilities to elicit information about their play habits, experiences, and accessibility issues. The second study consisted of a series of semi-structured interviews with individuals from the game industry to better understand accessibility's situation in their design and development processes. Through quantitative and qualitative thematic analysis, we derive high-level insights from the data, such as the prevalence of assistive technology incompatibility and the value of middleware for implementing accessibility standardization. Finally, we discuss specific implications and how these insights can be used to define future work which may help to narrow the gap.

Because interacting with a robot is a novel experience for most adults, expectations about a robot's capabilities must come from sources other than past experiences. This paper explores the relationship between capabilities of robots portrayed in popular science fiction films and students' expectations about a real robot. A content analysis of 12 American science fiction films showed that fictional robots reliably display cognitive capabilities, but do not consistently exhibit many humanlike social behaviors. Survey data collected from students follow the same basic patterns: people expect robots to have humanlike cognitive capabilities, but not social capabilities. The results are discussed in terms of how an empirical evaluation of cultural artifacts can inform the study of human-robot interaction.