Computer vision systems are increasingly used by blind individuals to navigate their lives, helping, for example, locate objects such as doors or chairs. Yet these recognition systems do not work for many personal objects a blind user might want to find, such as keys or a special notebook. In response, efforts created personalized recognition systems, where individuals train their phones to identify and locate things, like a coffee mug or white cane, using example images/videos. However, these tools are trained on data from high-resource contexts, not necessarily reflecting India’s material culture. This paper discusses the contribution of the ORBIT-India dataset, which extends these tools to the Indian context, home of the world’s largest blind population. The ORBIT-India dataset comprises 105,243 images from 587 videos, representing 76 unique objects. We use this experience to examine dataset collection practices translated from high- to low-resource settings, providing recommendations to support cross-geography dataset collection.

Assistive technologies, such as smartphone-based object-recognition (OR) apps, provide visual assistance to people who are blind or lowvision to enable increased independent participation in society.While previous research has explored the functional accessibility of object-recognition technologies, little attention has been given to their social accessibility, particularly in interdependent sociocultural contexts of the Global South.Through a mixed-methods approach, employing a seven-day diary study followed by one-onone interviews with seven OR app users in India, we explore their experiences in depth.Our findings highlight the nuances of what interdependence looks like in a multicultural, Indian society, as people navigate public and private spheres with a camera-based assistive technology designed for independent, western contexts.We argue for the necessity to design assistive technologies following the interdependence framework that accommodates the social and cultural context of the Global South.Additionally, we propose design guidelines for assistive technologies in community-oriented societies, emphasizing community-centered approaches, cultural alignment, and locally adaptable designs.

The privacy dimensions of accessibility technologies are often understudied and overlooked. Very little prior research has investigated the privacy concerns of disabled people, and much less has studied the barriers of privacy-preserving techniques. In order to address this gap and bridge between two separate communities (accessibility and privacy), our one-day workshop explores how researchers might design and build technologies that are both accessible and privacy-preserving.

Current infrastructure design, discouragement by parents, and lack of internal motivation act as barriers for people with visual impairments (PVIs) to perform physical activities at par with sighted individuals. This has triggered accessible exercise technologies to be an emerging area of research. However, most current solutions have either safety concerns and/or are expensive, hence limiting their mass adoption. In our work, we propose VStroll, a smartphone app to promote walking among PVIs, by enabling them to virtually explore real-world locations, while physically walking in the safety and comfort of their homes. Walking is a cheap, accessible, and a common physical activity for people with blindness. VStroll has several added features, such as places-of-interest (POI) announcement using spatial audio and voice input for route selection at every intersection, which helps the user to gain spatial awareness while walking. To understand the usability of VStroll, 16 participants used our app for five days, followed by a semi-structured interview. Overall, our participants took 253 trips, walked for 50.8 hours covering 121.6 kms. We uncovered novel insights, such as discovering new POIs and fitness-related updates acted as key motivators, route selection boosted their confidence in navigation, and spatial audio resulted in an immersive experience. We conclude the paper with key lessons learned to promote accessible exercise technologies.

Most children who are blind live in low-resource settings and attend schools that have poor technical infrastructure, overburdened teachers, and outdated curriculum. Our work explores the role digital games can play to develop digital skills of such children in the early grades. Recognizing the critical role of teachers in introducing children to technology, we conducted a mixed-methods study to examine which attributes of digital games teachers find useful for children and what challenges they perceive in integrating digital games in schools for the blind. Our findings indicate that teachers prefer games that align well with curriculum objectives, promote learning, improve soft skills, and increase engagement with computers. Despite being overburdened and lacking technological support, teachers expressed strong enthusiasm to integrate these games in school curriculum and schedule. We conclude by discussing design implications for designers of accessible games in low-resource settings.

Project Torino is a physical programming environment designed for teaching computational thinking (CT) to school children in the UK, regardless of the level of vision. We introduced Project Torino to children in three schools for the blind in Bangalore, India as a toy for playing with songs, rhymes, and stories. We present the results of 103 semi-structured play sessions spread over three months with 12 children (2 girls, 10 boys) with diverse backgrounds. We found that children progressed from playing with pre-connected examples, to making changes, to actively participating in what items are played. Engaging the children in conversation while they played, we established that the teams had grasped three basic concepts of computational thinking--flow of control, variables, and loops, without any explicit instructions towards learning them. We propose that play-based approaches can be successfully used with low resource overhead to introduce fundamental concepts of CT.

Torino is a tangible programming environment designed for teaching the computational thinking curriculum in the UK to children who are blind or low vision (henceforth, just children) in an inclusive setting. In this paper we describe the experience of children in Bangalore, India, when Torino was introduced to them as a toy for creating and sharing stories, songs and music. We conducted 12 play sessions with 12 children (4 girls and 8 boys) with diverse backgrounds belonging to three different schools for the blind. We briefly present the reasons for play being central to our effort of bringing computational thinking to children who are blind and low vision in India, and share some experiences of the children and some insights that we have gathered so far: Children not only enjoyed every session, they rapidly moved from playing with pre-created examples, to making changes, to demanding that their favorite stories be told. In observing such play, we could infer that they have grasped the basic concepts of computational thinking? flow of control, variables, loops? though not articulated in that vocabulary.