Generative AI is increasingly present in children’s learning environments, yet little is known about how families navigate this technology in middle childhood (ages 7–13), when parental guidance remains strong but children seek independence. Drawing on self-directed learning (SDL), we explore how parents in our exploratory sample perceived children’s emerging self-directness and agency. Through focus groups with 13 parent–child pairs, we examine parents’ views on children’s AI literacy development, readiness factors, and mediation strategies. Parents described emergent pathways shaped by screen time, self-directness, and knowledge growth. They often confined AI to learning-only contexts, positioning it as a tutor while overlooking non-learning uses and risks such as privacy and infrastructural embedding. Many acknowledged limited AI literacy and turned to joint engagement as opportunities for co-learning. Our findings surface possible parental pathways of children’s AI literacy, highlight gaps between pragmatic expectations and critical literacies, and offer situated design considerations for AI systems that scaffold SDL while balancing oversight with autonomy.

Large multimodal models (LMMs) have enabled new AI-powered applications that help people with visual impairments (PVI) receive natural language descriptions of their surroundings through audible text. We investigated how this emerging paradigm of visual assistance transforms how PVI perform and manage their daily tasks. Moving beyond basic usability assessments, we examined both the capabilities and limitations of LMM-based tools in personal and social contexts, while exploring design implications for their future development. Through interviews with 14 visually impaired users and analysis of image descriptions from both participants and social media using Be My AI (an LMM-based application), we identified two key limitations. First, these systems' context awareness suffers from hallucinations and misinterpretations of social contexts, styles, and human identities. Second, their intent-oriented capabilities often fail to grasp and act on users' intentions. Based on these findings, we propose design strategies for improving both human-AI and AI-AI interactions, contributing to the development of more effective, interactive, and personalized assistive technologies.

This study investigates the dynamics of peer-to-peer support exchange (P2P SE) in non-monetized sharing economies. Utilizing a scenario-based within-subjects experiment with 93 participants across nine conditions, we examined how support request visibility and recognition for making requests affect perceived social costs of seeking help. We also explored the interplay between these social costs, community belonging, and confidence in giving and getting support in shaping future participation intentions. Our findings revealed that participants often leveraged different strategies to mitigate social costs of seeking support, such as justifying needs to ask for help, using apologetic language, and offering direct reciprocation or compensation, diverging from the ideals of non-monetized P2P SE. However, we found that receiving recognition for making requests, particularly from helpers, effectively reduces social cost concerns. We also discovered that interventions to strengthen a sense of community belonging and confidence in giving support should be prioritized to enhance future participation intentions. Our study offers insights for designing platforms to enhance participation and achieve critical mass in non-monetized sharing economies, addressing key psychological barriers and leveraging facilitators of P2P SE.

Remote sighted assistance (RSA) offers prosthetic support to people with visual impairments (PVI) through image- or video-based conversations with remote sighted assistants. While useful, RSA services introduce privacy concerns, as PVI may reveal private visual content inadvertently. Solutions have emerged to address these concerns on image-based asynchronous RSA, but exploration into solutions for video-based synchronous RSA remains limited. In this study, we developed BubbleCam, a high-fidelity prototype allowing PVI to conceal objects beyond a certain distance during RSA, granting them privacy control. Through an exploratory field study with 24 participants, we found that 22 appreciated the privacy enhancements offered by BubbleCam. The users gained autonomy, reducing embarrassment by concealing private items, messy areas, or bystanders, while assistants could avoid irrelevant content. Importantly, BubbleCam maintained RSA’s primary function without compromising privacy. Our study highlighted a cooperative approach to privacy preservation, transitioning the traditionally individual task of maintaining privacy into an interactive, engaging privacy preserving experience.

Beginning in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic repercussions exacerbated food insecurity in the United States. Government-led infrastructure was depleted as a result of a dramatic increase in the number of individuals requesting basic necessities and food aid, and grassroots attempts to alleviate the resource shortage increased. The Community Fridge movement was one of these initiatives that combated food insecurity and food waste. It consisted of local community members sharing surplus food with neighbors via a shared refrigerator placed on a sidewalk. We conducted semi-structured interviews with its 17 users to understand how they practice information, human, and social infrastructuring work, as well as how their core values shaped norms for managing refrigerators and surplus food as the commons in local communities. We discuss how the concepts of commoning and infrastructuring may complement one another, which can help design value-embedded interventions to promote infrastructuring practices that build resilience and sustain commoning practices.

Remote Sighted Assistance (RSA) is a popular smartphone-mediated aid for people with blindness, where a sighted individual converses with a blind individual in a one-on-one (1:1) session. Since sighted assistants outnumber blind individuals (13:1), this paper investigates what happens when more than one sighted individual assists a single blind individual in a session. Specifically, we propose paired-volunteer RSA, a new paradigm where two sighted volunteers assist a single user with blindness. We investigate the feasibility, desirability, and challenges of this paradigm and explore its opportunities. Our study with 8 sighted volunteers and 9 blind users reveals that the proposed paradigm extends the one-on-one RSA to cover a broader range of more intellectual and experiential tasks, providing new and distinctive opportunities in supporting complex, open-ended tasks (e.g., pursuing hobbies, appreciating arts, and seeking entertainment). These opportunities can not only enrich the blind users' quality of life and independence but also offer a fun and engaging experience for the sighted volunteers. The study also reveals the costs of extended collaboration in this paradigm. Finally, we synthesize a taxonomy of tasks where the proposed RSA paradigm can succeed and outline how HCI researchers and system designers can realize this paradigm.

., agents, provide real-time assistance to blind users via video-chat-like communication. Prior work identified several challenges for the agents to provide navigational assistance to users and proposed computer vision-mediated RSA service to address those challenges. We present an interactive system implementing a high-fidelity prototype of RSA service using augmented reality (AR) maps with localization and virtual elements placement capabilities. The paper also presents a confederate-based study design to evaluate the effects of AR maps with 13 untrained agents. The study revealed that, compared to baseline RSA, agents were significantly faster in providing indoor navigational assistance to a confederate playing the role of users, and agents' mental workload was significantly reduced-all indicate the feasibility and scalability of AR maps in RSA services.

Remote sighted assistance (RSA) has emerged as a conversational assistive technology for people with visual impairments (VI), where remote sighted agents provide realtime navigational assistance to users with visual impairments via video-chat-like communication. In this paper, we conducted a literature review and interviewed 12 RSA users to comprehensively understand technical and navigational challenges in RSA for both the agents and users. Technical challenges are organized into four categories: agents' difficulties in orienting and localizing the users; acquiring the users' surroundings and detecting obstacles; delivering information and understanding user-specific situations; and coping with a poor network connection. Navigational challenges are presented in 15 real-world scenarios (8 outdoor, 7 indoor) for the users. Prior work indicates that computer vision (CV) technologies, especially interactive 3D maps and realtime localization, can address a subset of these challenges. However, we argue that addressing the full spectrum of these challenges warrants new development in Human-CV collaboration, which we formalize as five emerging problems: making object recognition and obstacle avoidance algorithms blind-aware; localizing users under poor networks; recognizing digital content on LCD screens; recognizing texts on irregular surfaces; and predicting the trajectory of out-of-frame pedestrians or objects. Addressing these problems can advance computer vision research and usher into the next generation of RSA service.

Remote sighted assistance (RSA) is an emerging navigational aid for people with visual impairments (PVI). Using scenario-based design to illustrate our ideas, we developed a prototype showcasing potential applications for computer vision to support RSA interactions. We reviewed the prototype demonstrating real-world navigation scenarios with an RSA expert, and then iteratively refined the prototype based on feedback. We reviewed the refined prototype with 12 RSA professionals to evaluate the desirability and feasibility of the prototyped computer vision concepts. The RSA expert and professionals were engaged by, and reacted insightfully and constructively to the proposed design ideas. We discuss what we learned about key resources, goals, and challenges of the RSA prosthetic practice through our iterative prototype review, as well as implications for the design of RSA systems and the integration of computer vision technologies into RSA.