A primary challenge for students with blindness or visual impairments (BVI) in programming education lies in the limited accessibility of debugging tools. While debugging is crucial, students with BVI often face significant barriers when trying to navigate to error messages, locate errors in the code, and verify fixes. This challenge is particularly problematic for Jupyter Notebook and its variants, as error messages are typically displayed in a separate block beneath the code. This separation makes it difficult for screen readers to effectively report the location and nature of errors.

Real-time collaboration tools (e.g., videoconferencing or project management) are central to modern work but often pose significant accessibility challenges for blind and low vision (BLV) people.While these tools can support both in-person and remote collaboration, barriers to usability and access can hinder full workforce participation.Prior research has explored accessibility issues with specific tools, but broader insights into how BLV people use and experience mainstream collaboration platforms remain limited.We conducted an online survey with 155 BLV users, evaluating the ease of using 30 widely used collaboration tools.Findings show that Zoom is rated as the easiest tool to use, however, project management and whiteboarding tools are rated relatively difficult to use.Over half of the respondents reported that accessibility barriers negatively impact their collaboration, job performance, and career growth.We discuss the compounding effects of inaccessible collaborative tools and offer design recommendations for more inclusive digital workspaces.

With remote work becoming a prevalent practice, the use of videoconferencing tools has significantly increased. While the accessibility of these tools in remote work has been studied previously, there is a lack of understanding of how professionals with disabilities conduct meetings using them and what accessibility means in this context. To fill this gap, we investigated the experience and accessibility practices of 18 blind and low vision (BLV) meeting facilitators who regularly use videoconferencing tools. Our findings reveal that BLV professionals undertake several steps to facilitate meetings effectively, including preparing materials in advance, ensuring the security of the meetings, maintaining awareness of attendees’ activity, coordinating with co-hosts to overcome accessibility obstacles, maintaining professionalism, and advocating for accessible meeting practices and technology. We discuss how our findings reveal barriers to career advancement for BLV professionals, help understand the interdependent activity of meeting facilitators and co-hosts, and provide recommendations for making videoconferencing more accessible.

Smart voice assistants such as Amazon Alexa and Google Home are becoming increasingly pervasive in our everyday environments. Despite their benefits, their miniaturized and embedded cameras and microphones raise important privacy concerns related to surveillance and eavesdropping. Recent work on the privacy concerns of people in the vicinity of these devices has highlighted the need for 'tangible privacy', where control and feedback mechanisms can provide a more assured sense of whether the camera or microphone is 'on' or 'off'. However, current designs of these devices lack adequate mechanisms to provide such assurances. To address this gap in the design of smart voice assistants, especially in the case of disabling microphones, we evaluate several designs that incorporate (or not) tangible control and feedback mechanisms. By comparing people's perceptions of risk, trust, reliability, usability, and control for these designs in a between-subjects online experiment (N=261), we find that devices with tangible built-in physical controls are perceived as more trustworthy and usable than those with non-tangible mechanisms. Our findings present an approach for tangible, assured privacy especially in the context of embedded microphones.

With the rising popularity of photo sharing in online social media, interpersonal privacy violations, where one person violates the privacy of another, have become an increasing concern. Although applying image obfuscations can be a useful tool for improving privacy when sharing photos, prior studies have found these obfuscation techniques adversely affect viewers' satisfaction. On the other hand, ephemeral photos, popularized by apps such as Snapchat, allow viewers to see the entire photo, which then disappears shortly thereafter to protect privacy. However, people often use workarounds to save these photos before deletion. In this work, we study people's sharing preferences with two proposed 'temporal redactions', which combines ephemerality with redactions to allow viewers to see the entire image, yet make these images safe for longer storage through a gradual or delayed application of redaction on the sensitive portions of the photo. We conducted an online experiment (N=385) to study people's sharing behaviors in different contexts and under different levels of assurance provided by the viewer's platform (e.g., guaranteeing temporal redactions are applied through the use of 'trusted hardware'). Our findings suggest that the proposed temporal redaction mechanisms are often preferred over existing methods. On the other hand, more efforts are needed to convey the benefits of trusted hardware to users, as no significant differences were observed in attitudes towards 'trusted hardware' on viewers' devices.

Camera based assistive technologies such as smart glasses can provide people with visual impairments (PVIs) information about people in their vicinity. Although such ‘visually available’ information can enhance one’s social interactions, the privacy implications for bystanders from the perspective of PVIs remains underexplored. Motivated by prior findings of bystanders’ perspectives, we conducted two online surveys with visually impaired (N=128) and sighted (N=136) participants with two ‘field-of-view’ (FoV) experimental conditions related to whether information about bystanders was gathered from the front of the glasses or all directions. We found that PVIs considered it as ‘fair’ and equally useful to receive information from all directions. However, they reported being uncomfortable in receiving some visually apparent information (such as weight and gender) about bystanders as they felt it was ‘impolite’ or ‘improper’. Both PVIs and bystanders shared concerns about the fallibility of AI, where bystanders can be misrepresented by the devices. Our finding suggests that beyond issues of social stigma, both PVIs and bystanders have shared concerns that need to be considered to improve the social acceptability of camera based assistive technologies.

A critical element for a successful transition is the ability to disclose, or make known, one's struggles. We explore the transition disclosure practices of Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) students who are transitioning from an individualistic culture to one that is highly collective. As ROTC students routinely evaluate their peers through a ranking system, the act of disclosure may impact a student's ability to secure limited opportunities within the military upon graduation. Through a qualitative interview study of active ROTC students (N=14) examining how they use information communication technologies (ICTs) to disclose their struggles in a hyper-competitive environment, we find they engage in a process of highly selective disclosure, choosing different groups with which to disclose based on the types of issues they face. We share implications for designing ICTs that better facilitate how ROTC students cope with personal challenges during their formative transition into the military.

Ubiquitous heterogeneous wireless networks demand a general-purpose multi-objective vertical hand-off mechanism taking into account network dynamics as one of its decision attributes. However, to the best of our knowledge, such a mechanism is yet to be devised. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a new multi-objective vertical hand-off (MOVH) mechanism that takes into account network dynamics as one of its decision attributes. We customize Multi-Objective Genetic Algorithm (MOGA) in this regard. The results obtained from our numerical simulation demonstrate that the proposed mechanism yields better scalability and stability. We also evaluate the performance of our MOVH mechanism against two most popular alternatives: GRA and TOPSIS. This evaluation comprises of both test-bed experiments and ns-2 simulation. The results from both test-bed experiments and ns-2 simulation demonstrate that the proposed MOVH mechanism has significant performance improvement over both GRA and TOPSIS.