Amidst the shift towards digital news media, the news consumption behavior of the blind and visually impaired (BVI) has undergone significant changes. Despite extensive prior work in HCI and Accessibility literature around digital media accessibility for the BVI community – digital news consumption practices among BVI individuals remain inadequately explored. This study focuses on digital news consumption practices among BVI individuals in India. We conducted semi-structured interviews and contextual inquiry with 17 participants, revealing diverse motivations rooted in social mobility and belongingness. Participants disclosed navigational barriers, such as dynamic advertisements, and consequently relied on volunteer-driven ad-free newspapers as a stopgap. While news source preferences were shaped by interface accessibility, factors like neutrality and coverage played a crucial role too. Our findings highlight the need for a nuanced understanding of BVI users’ experiences and inform implications and recommendations for designing accessible digital news platforms.

A long-standing challenge in accessible computing has been to get developers to produce the accessible UI code necessary for assistive technologies to work properly. AI coding assistants (e.g., Github Copilot) potentially offer a new opportunity to make UI code more accessible automatically, but it is unclear how their use impacts code accessibility and what developers need to know in order to use them effectively. In this paper, we report on a study where developers untrained in accessibility were tasked with building web UI components with and without an AI coding assistant. Our findings suggest that while current AI coding assistants show potential for creating more accessible UIs, they currently require accessibility awareness and expertise, limiting their expected impact.