Media representations of people with disabilities profoundly influence societal perceptions, yet have historically been absent, stereotyped, or inaccurate. As AI-generated visual media becomes increasingly prevalent, there is a critical opportunity to address these misrepresentations. Responding to the lack of collectively negotiated representation standards, this paper presents our human-centric approach to engaging disability communities meaningfully in AI data practices. Over three months, we worked closely with three disability organizations across the Global North and South to develop the Community Library Creator that introduces design scaffolds to support communities in defining ‘good’ representation and curating community-centric AI datasets; laying the foundations for community-specific evaluation metrics and future model adaptations. We contribute qualitative insights into the complexities of community-led data curation; discuss the value and practical challenges of intersecting human insights with AI requirements; and reflect on human-centered AI approaches that empower communities to share their perspectives and actively shape AI data practices.

The ability to navigate independently through indoor spaces, like airports, is critical for people with visual impairments (PWVI). Yet, prior assistive technology (AT) research tends to decenter the needs of people with residual vision, who constitute the vast majority of PWVI. We conducted an autoethnography of a PWVI with residual vision across eight round-trips through six airports. We found that the physical and digital infrastructure of airports imbue assumptions of total sightedness, while assistive services assume total blindness, with little consideration for travelers with residual vision. We document how accessibility at points of interest is equally important to the navigability between them, suggesting that traditional turn-by-turn approaches may be insufficient for independent air travel by PWVI. Moreover, we argue that current airport and navigation AT design undermines the agency of travelers with residual vision; we call for development of a new class of navigation technologies that center the usable vision of PWVI.

Like many parents, visually impaired parents (VIPs) read books with their children. However, research on accessible reading technologies predominantly focuses on blind adults reading alone or sighted adults reading with blind children, such that the motivations, strategies, and needs of blind parents reading with their sighted children are still largely undocumented. To address this gap, we interviewed 13 VIPs with young children. We found that VIPs (1) sought familial intimacy through reading with their child, often prioritizing intimacy over their own access needs, (2) took on many types of access labor to read with their children, and (3) desired novel assistive technologies (ATs) for reading that prioritize intimacy while reducing access labor. We contribute the notion of Intimate AT, along with a demonstrative design space, which together constitute a new design paradigm that draws attention to intimacy as a facet of both independently and collaboratively accessible ATs.

Co-reading, an activity where adults collaboratively read books with child(ren), is important for literacy learning and forming human connection. However, parents and guardians with visual impairments do not experience the same level of access to resources when co-reading with their child(ren) as their sighted counterparts, especially as regards images in children’s books. Through conducting an interview study with five visually impaired parents/guardians, we illuminate the importance parents place on images in children’s books, how they access visual information in children’s print books, and the potential of smart speakers in assisting their existing co-reading practices.

To make images on Twitter and other social media platforms accessible to screen reader users, image descriptions (alternative text) need to be added that describe the information contained within the image. The lack of alternative text has been an enduring accessibility problem since the “alt” attribute was added in HTML 2.0 over 20 years ago, and the rise of user-generated content has only increased the number of images shared. As of 2016, Twitter provides users the ability to turn on a feature that allows descriptions to be added to images in their tweets, presumably in an effort to combat this accessibility problem. What has remained unknown is whether simply enabling users to provide alternative text has an impact on experienced accessibility. In this paper, we present a study of 1.09 million tweets with images, finding that only 0.1% of those tweets included descriptions. In a separate analysis of the timelines of 94 blind Twitter users, we found that these image tweets included descriptions more often. Even users with the feature turned on only write descriptions for about half of the images they tweet. To better understand why users provide alternative text descriptions (or not), we interviewed 20 Twitter users who have written image descriptions. Users did not remember to add alternative text, did not have time to add it, or did not know what to include when writing the descriptions. Our findings indicate that simply making it possible to provide image descriptions is not enough, and reveal future directions for automated tools that may support users in writing high-quality descriptions.

The idea of using technology to help those with visual impairments navigate has been studied extensively. However, most of these systems focus on getting the user from place to place, rather than helping the person get a better sense and intuition of their environment. Providing blind people with the same intuitive clues that sighted persons have may allow them to better navigate physical spaces, and also feel more empowered to freely explore the physical location. For this purpose, we have begun to study the process that sighted individuals use for familiarizing and getting a sense of their environment. We believe our results will show it is possible to enhance the navigational capabilities of blind people by providing access to the same clues used by sighted people to get a sense of their environment.