Visual design instructors often provide multi-modal feedback, mixing annotations with text. Prior theory emphasizes the importance of actionable feedback, where “actionability” lies on a spectrum—from surfacing relevant design concepts to suggesting concrete fixes. How might creativity tools implement annotations that support such feedback, and how does the actionability of feedback impact novices’ process-related behaviors, perceptions of creativity, learning of design principles, and overall outcomes? We introduce VizCrit, a system for providing computational feedback that supports the actionability spectrum, realized through algorithmic issue detection and visual annotation generation. In a between-subjects study (N=36), novices revised a design under one of three conditions: textbook-based, awareness-centered, or solution-centered feedback. We found that solution-centered feedback led to fewer design issues and higher self-perceived creativity compared with textbook-based feedback, although expert ratings on creativity showed no significant differences. We discuss the implications for AI in Creativity Support Tools, including the potential of calibrating feedback actionability to help novices balance productivity with learning, growth, and developing design awareness.

Collaborative ideation tools like digital whiteboards are widely used by designers, academics, and creative practitioners; yet most ideation tools are inaccessible to blind or low vision (BLV) users. Informed by prior work on whiteboarding challenges encountered by BLV users and our formative study with eight sighted whiteboard users, we built Idea11y, a whiteboard plug-in that provides a hierarchical, editable text outline of board content, augmented with audio cues and voice coding. Findings from evaluation with thirteen BLV screen reader users revealed how Idea11y supported BLV users’ understanding of clustering structure and streamlined their process to author, synthesize, and prioritize ideas on the board. Collaborative ideation sessions with six BLV-sighted dyads demonstrated how BLV users used Idea11y to develop collaboration awareness and coordinate actions with sighted collaborators. Drawing on this, we discuss ways to move beyond implicit visual norms in established ideation frameworks and practical considerations for future accessible ideation systems.

Collaboration and community building are crucial for equitable participation in research, especially in disability and accessibility research fields.Engaging with communities of disabled individuals helps understand their unique challenges, expectations, and needs, which should be reflected in assistive technology design.However, a gap exists between research in resource-rich societies and the practices of low-resource settings, where socio-economic and infrastructural constraints are often overlooked.Conversely, the innovation and sustainable solutions in these settings are often

Computational thinking (CT) is regarded as a fundamental twenty-first century skill and has been implemented in many early childhood education curriculum. Yet, the needs of neurodivergent children have remained largely overlooked in the extensive research and technologies built to foster CT among children. To address this, we investigated how to support neurodiverse (i.e., groups involving neurodivergent and neurotypical) preschoolers aged 3-5 in learning CT concepts. Grounded in interviews with six teachers, we deployed an age-appropriate, programmable robot called KIBO in two preschool classrooms involving 12 neurodivergent and 17 neurotypical children for eight weeks. Using interaction analysis, we illustrate how neurodivergent children found enjoyment in assembling KIBO and learned to code with it while engaging in cooperative and competitive play with neurotypical peers and the adults. Through this, we discuss accessible adaptations needed to enhance CT among neurodivergent preschoolers and ways to reimagine technology-mediated social play for them.

Deceptive design patterns manipulate people into actions to which they would otherwise object. Despite growing research on deceptive design patterns, limited research examines their interplay with accessibility and visual accessibility technology (e.g., screen readers, screen magnification, braille displays). We present an interview and diary study with 16 people who use visual accessibility technology to better understand experiences with accessibility and deceptive design. We report participant experiences with six deceptive design patterns, including designs that are intentionally deceptive and designs where participants describe accessibility barriers unintentionally manifesting as deceptive, together with direct and indirect consequences of deceptive patterns. We discuss intent versus impact in accessibility and deceptive design, how access barriers exacerbate harms of deceptive design patterns, and impacts of deceptive design from a perspective of consequence-based accessibility. We propose that accessibility tools could help address deceptive design patterns by offering higher-level feedback to well-intentioned designers.

The proliferation of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) tools has brought a critical shift in how people approach information retrieval and content creation in diverse contexts. Yet, we have limited understanding of how blind people use and make sense of GenAI systems. To bridge this gap, we report findings from interviews with 19 blind individuals who incorporate mainstream GenAI tools like ChatGPT and Be My AI in their everyday practices. Our findings reveal how blind users navigate accessibility issues, inaccuracies, hallucinations, and idiosyncracies associated with GenAI and develop interesting (but often flawed) mental models of how these tools work. We discuss key considerations for rethinking access and information verification in GenAI tools, unpacking erroneous mental models among blind users, and reconciling harms and benefits of GenAI from an accessibility perspective.

AI-generated images are proliferating as a new visual medium. However, state-of-the-art image generation models do not output alternative (alt) text with their images, rendering them largely inaccessible to screen reader users (SRUs). Moreover, less is known about what information would be most desirable to SRUs in this new medium. To address this, we invited AI image creators and SRUs to evaluate alt text prepared from various sources and write their own alt text for AI images. Our mixed-methods analysis makes three contributions. First, we highlight creators’ perspectives on alt text, as creators are well-positioned to write descriptions of their images. Second, we illustrate SRUs’ alt text needs particular to the emerging medium of AI images. Finally, we discuss the promises and pitfalls of utilizing text prompts written as input for AI models in alt text generation, and areas where broader digital accessibility guidelines could expand to account for AI images.

Collaborative ideation plays a vital role in driving creativity and innovation across various professional and educational contexts. This study investigates the experiences of disabled individuals within the collaborative ideation process, specifically examining their utilization of digital whiteboarding tools. Through interviews with 19 professionals and academics with disabilities, alongside a thematic analysis of online forum posts for two popular digital whiteboarding platforms (Miro and Figma), we delve into the access barriers encountered by disabled individuals and the strategies they employ to create access in collaborative ideation. Our findings illuminate the multifaceted nature of access barriers, encompassing issues such as inaccessible visual features, technology-induced discomfort, unstructured nature of freeform content, and complex communication setups. Furthermore, we uncover the intricate dynamics involved in negotiating diverse access needs and conflicts within teams involving people with different disabilities. Through this analysis, we highlight tensions around proficiency with inaccessible technologies stemming from ableist standards of professional success and discuss the implications of our findings for the design of accessible collaborative ideation systems.

Enabling opportunities for young children with disabilities to co-engage in learning activities alongside their non-disabled peers is essential for promoting equity in early childhood education. We investigate how collaborative technology can be designed to support young neurodivergent and neurotypical children in playing together. By integrating theories and methods from design, HCI, and the learning sciences, we iteratively designed, developed, and evaluated a novel tablet application called Incloodle-Classroom (Incloodle in short), that takes into account the needs of neurodiverse groups of children and the adults who support them during play. We deployed Incloodle in a kindergarten classroom of 15 neurodivergent and 16 neurotypical children over a 10-week period. Using interaction analysis, we present rich empirical understandings of how children interacted with each other, with adults, and with Incloodle. In doing so, we contribute new theoretical underpinnings to collaborative and accessible technology design, extending joint media engagement to encompass inclusivity and equity.

The maker movement has garnered significant attention as democratizing design; yet, recent work has called attention to the challenges disabled people encounter in making. Although researchers have built systems to improve accessibility of maker technologies, limited studies have centered disabled people’s engagement in traditional forms of making like fiber arts. We examine the practice of fabric pattern design among a community of blind weavers who create hand-woven products with sighted instructors. Grounded in seventeen interviews with blind weavers and sighted instructors, we built Simphony, an audio-tactile system that aims to support blind weavers in creating and perceiving patterns. Findings from eight design exploration sessions at the community studio reveal how blind weavers used Simphony to learn the process of pattern design and generate patterns with sighted instructors. We reflect on collaborative understanding of pattern design among blind and sighted individuals and discuss opportunities for integrating technological augmentations into traditional craftwork.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced researchers to find new ways to continue research, as universities and laboratories experienced closure due to nationwide lockdowns in many countries worldwide, including conducting experiments, workshops, and ethnographic work online. While this had a significant impact on the majority of research work across SIGCHI, research relating to disability and ageing was most impacted due to the additional challenges of recruiting participants, finding accessible online platforms, and ensuring seamless participation while juggling platform accessibility issues, facilitation, and supporting participants’ needs. These challenges were more extreme for disabled researchers. In this workshop, we aim to bring together researchers, designers, and practitioners to explore effective strategies and brainstorm actionable guidelines for supporting disability inclusive online research methods and platforms.

Collaborative writing is an integral part of academic and professional work. Although some prior research has focused on accessibility in collaborative writing, we know little about how visually impaired writers work in real-time with sighted collaborators or how online editing tools could better support their work. Grounded in formative interviews and observations with eight screen reader users, we built Co11ab, a Google Docs extension that provides configurable audio cues to facilitate understanding who is editing (or edited) what and where in a shared document. Results from a design exploration with fifteen screen reader users, including three naturalistic sessions of use with sighted colleagues, reveal how screen reader users understand various auditory representations and use them to coordinate real-time collaborative writing. We revisit what collaboration awareness means for screen reader users and discuss design considerations for future systems.

Collaborative writing tools have been used widely in professional and academic organizations for many years. Yet, there has not been much work to improve screen reader access in mainstream collaborative writing tools. This severely affects the way people with vision impairments collaborate in ability-diverse teams. As a step toward addressing this issue, the present article aims at improving screen reader representation of collaborative features such as comments and track changes (i.e., suggested edits). Building on our formative interviews with 20 academics and professionals with vision impairments, we developed auditory representations that indicate comments and edits using non-speech audio (e.g., earcons, tone overlay), multiple text-to-speech voices, and contextual presentation techniques. We then performed a systematic evaluation study with 48 screen reader users that indicated that non-speech audio, changing voices, and contextual presentation can potentially improve writers’ collaboration awareness. We discuss implications of these results for the design of accessible collaborative systems.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced many people to convert their daily work lives to a “virtual” format where everyone connected remotely from their home. In this new, virtual environment, accessibility barriers changed, in some respects for the better (e.g., more flexibility) and in other aspects, for the worse (e.g., problems including American Sign Language interpreters over video calls). Microsoft Research held its first cohort of all virtual interns in 2020. We the authors, full time and intern members and affiliates of the Ability Team, a research team focused on accessibility, reflect on our virtual work experiences as a team consisting of members with a variety of abilities, positions, and seniority during the summer intern season. Through our autoethnographic method, we provide a nuanced view into the experiences of a mixed-ability, virtual team, and how the virtual setting affected the team’s accessibility. We then reflect on these experiences, noting the successful strategies we used to promote access and the areas in which we could have further improved access. Finally, we present guidelines for future virtual mixed-ability teams looking to improve access.

Working from home has become a mainstream work practice in many organizations during the COVID-19 pandemic. While remote work has received much scholarly and public attention over the years, we still know little about how people with disabilities engage in remote work from their homes and what access means in this context. To understand and rethink accessibility in remote work, the present paper studies work-from-home practices of neurodivergent professionals who have Autism Spectrum Disorder, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, learning disabilities (e.g., dyslexia) and psychosocial disabilities (e.g., anxiety, depression). We report on interviews with 36 US-based neurodivergent professionals who have been working from home during the pandemic. Our findings reveal that while working from home, neurodivergent professionals create accessible physical and digital workspaces, negotiate accessible communication practices, and reconcile tensions between productivity and wellbeing. Our analysis reconsiders what access means in remote work for neurodivergent professionals and offers practical insights for inclusive work practices and accessibility improvements in remote collaboration tools.

The rise of maker communities and fabrication tools creates new opportunities for participation in design work. With this has come an interest in increasing the accessibility of making for people with disabilities, which has mainly emphasized independence and empowerment through the creation of more accessible fabrication tools. To understand and rethink the notion of accessible making, we analyze the context and practices of a particular site of making: the communal weaving studio within an assisted living facility for people with vision impairments. Our analysis helps reconsider the material and social processes that constitute accessible making, including the ways makers attend to interactive material properties, negotiate co-creative embodied work, and value the labor of making. We discuss future directions for design and research on accessible making while highlighting tensions around assistance, collaboration, and how disabled labor is valued.

Millions of people worldwide contribute content to peer production repositories that serve human information needs and provide vital world knowledge to prominent artificial intelligence systems. Yet, extreme gender participation disparities exist in which men significantly outnumber women. A central concern has been that due to self-focus bias, these disparities can lead to corresponding gender content disparities, in which content of interest to men is better represented than content of interest to women. This paper investigates the relationship between participation and content disparities in OpenStreetMap. We replicate findings that women are dramatically under-represented as OSM contributors, and observe that men and women contribute different types of content and do so about different places. However, the character of these differences confound simple narratives about self-focus bias: we find that on a proportional basis, men produced a higher proportion of contributions in feminized spaces compared to women, while women produced a higher proportion of contributions in masculinized spaces compared to men.

Collaborative writing tools have become ubiquitous in today's world and are used widely in many professional organizations and academic settings. Yet, we know little about how ability-diverse teams, such as those involving people with and without vision impairments, make use of collaborative writing tools. We report on interviews with 20 academics and professionals who are blind or visually impaired and perform collaborative writing with sighted colleagues. Our findings reveal that people with vision impairments perform collaborative writing activities through four interconnected processes, which include learning an ecosystem of (in)accessible tools, adapting to complexities of collaborative features, balancing the cost and benefit of accessibility, and navigating power dynamics within organizations. We discuss how our analysis contributes to theories of accessibility in collaboration and offers practical insights for future collaborative system design.

Smart technologies (wearable and mobile devices) show tremendous potential in the detection, diagnosis, and management of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) by enabling continuous real-time data collection, identifying effective treatment strategies, and supporting intervention design and delivery. Though promising, effective utilization of smart technology in aiding ASD is still limited. We propose a set of implications to guide the design of ASD-support technology by analyzing 149 peer-reviewed articles focused on children with autism from ACM Digital Library, IEEE Xplore, and PubMed. Our analysis reveals that technology should facilitate real-time detection and identification of points-of-interest, adapt its behavior driven by the real-time affective state of the user, utilize familiar and unfamiliar features depending on user-context, and aid in revealing even minuscule progress made by children with autism. Our findings indicate that such technology should strive to blend-in with everyday objects. Moreover, gradual exposure and desensitization may facilitate successful adaptation of novel technology.

Recent improvement in genomic research is paving the way towards significant progress in diagnosis and treatment of diseases. A disease risk query returns the probability of a patient to develop a particular disease based on her genomic and clinical data. Despite various innovative prospects, frequent and ubiquitous usage of genomic data in medical tests and personalized medicine may cause various privacy threats like genetic discrimination, exposure of susceptibility to diseases, and revelation of genomic data of relatives. Another major concern is on ensuring the reliability of the genome data and the correctness of the computed disease risk, which is known as authentication. We develop a novel secret sharing approach to protect privacy of sensitive genomic and clinical data, disease markers, disease name, and the query answer while ensuring authenticated result of the disease risk query. Experiments with real datasets show that our approach for authenticated disease risk queries achieves a high level of privacy with reduced processing and storage overhead.