While it is known that North Korean defectors (NKDs) struggle with South Korea's healthcare system, the specific challenges of their patient journey remain underexplored. To investigate this, we conducted interviews with 10 NKDs about an 8-step patient journey and identified the clinical consultation step as a critical barrier for all participants, marked by three key challenges: expressing symptoms, managing social and cultural concerns, and overcoming language differences. In response, we developed Medibridge, a mobile prototype that allows users to rehearse with an AI doctor before a real hospital visit to generate a tangible "Helper Note"for their actual consultation. Our evaluation with 15 NKDs showed improvements in perceived communication capability, including greater expression clarity, reduced social and cultural concerns, and enhanced linguistic confidence. Our contributions include an empirical understanding of NKDs' healthcare challenges, a novel AI-powered rehearsal system that prepares users for real-world clinical communication, and design implications for inclusive technologies for displaced populations.

Ensuring visual content accessible on websites is essential for users with visual impairments. However, existing alt text authoring tools often provide alt text only in the primary language or use literal machine translations for other languages, often failing to capture cultural nuances and resulting in inaccurate or misleading descriptions. To overcome this limitation, we introduce AltCAT, the first Alt text authoring tool for web developers that incorporates Culturally-Aware Translation. AltCAT integrates culture-specific knowledge and region-appropriate image description conventions into alt text translations. Our tool consists of two main components: an Alt Text Processing Engine that detects images and alt text on a webpage, generates high-quality alt text, and provides culturally-aware translations using large multimodal models, and an Interactive Authoring Interface for refinement and HTML export. Our key contributions are introducing culturally-aware alt text translation and a practical authoring tool for multilingual web accessibility.

Due to the increased availability of internet-based services, the number of e-commerce users among older adults is steadily growing. However, little is known about how older adults would adapt to modern e-commerce services, especially in the case of customer-to-customer (C2C) marketplaces as buyers and sellers. To address that, we propose a closed-domain conversational chatbot assistant that guides older adults through the product listing process. We evaluated the usability of our tool with 10 participants, consisting of a pre-test survey and a post-task interview. We found that while older adults proficiently operated with familiar functions such as text entry and photo taking, they faced challenges in understanding the purpose of each task and how tasks were related to each other. We suggest design implications for creating conversational chatbot assistants that help older adults sell items in C2C marketplaces.

Live streaming refers to the broadcast of real-time videos, allowing people to have synchronous interactions. While researchers' interest in live streaming has increased recently, the accessibility of live streaming for people with visual impairments is still under-examined. Further studies are necessary to gain a better understanding of how streamers with visual impairments (SVI) engage in various activities on live streaming platforms. Based on semi-structured interviews with 14 participants, we identified SVI's motivations for live streaming, their unique interactions with videos and people on live streaming platforms, and the challenges they face during live streaming. Our analysis of the identified themes revealed the absence of an SVI-centered community and accessibility issues for SVI while learning to live stream, use tools, and interact with people. Based on the results of this study, we present design opportunities to better support SVI on live streaming platforms.

We report on an interview study with two groups, student volunteers (SV) and student volunteer chairs (SVC), to explore their experiences in contributing to an academic conference. We identified themes regarding their behaviors and perceptions when communicating with each other through an open coding approach. The analysis of the findings reveals that communication issues exist between SV and SVC. While SV faced challenges approaching SVC, SVC had experienced difficulties in finding the right SV to ask for assistance in the tasks. We also found that the information provided by SVC was not sufficient for SV to perform the assigned tasks. Similarly, SVC had a similar issue where they received limited information from former SVC. We present design implications that enable both SV and SVC to share their availability, preferences, and prior knowledge of potential tasks with each other. This is the first study that reports design opportunities to support SV and SVC.

It is difficult for shoppers to estimate the amount of cost spent while shopping offline. Existing mobile platforms can be used to assist offline shoppers, but there still remain questions about the usability and affordability of such platforms. To reduce this gap, we propose SEEjang, a prototype for providing users with a smart, easy, and economical experience with offline shopping. We developed the application through a design thinking process to maximize consumer satisfaction with offline shopping.

We report a pilot study investigating experiences of virtual reality (VR) among young and older adults in a subway fire scenario. We created VR environments in subway fire scenarios and ran an experiment by asking 5 young and 5 older adults to explore VR environments. After the experiment, participants were asked to fill out a survey questionnaire to report their feelings. Additionally, we conducted semi-structured interviews with participants to understand challenges they faced while exploring VR environments. We found that compared with young adults, older adults tended to be different during the process of evacuating a subway station in virtual reality. We suggest design opportunities for creating VR environments for more effective training of older adults.

We explore a community of blind or visually impaired (BVI) people through video blogs (vlogs) on YouTube. Many researchers have used vlogs as a means of identifying communities of video bloggers (vloggers). Nevertheless, little is still known about how BVI vloggers interact through vlogs in video-based social media. To fill the gap, we identified BVI vloggers and types of the vlogs they produced by analyzing videos on YouTube. Also, we found how BVI vloggers were connected with each other through vlogs. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt utilizing vlogs to understand the community of BVI people on YouTube.

Timebanking is a growing type of peer-to-peer service exchange, but is hampered by the effort of finding good transaction partners. We seek to reduce this effort by using a Matching Algorithm for Service Transactions (MAST). MAST matches transaction partners in terms of similarity of interests and complementarity of abilities and needs. We present an experiment involving data and participants from a real timebanking network, that evaluates the acceptability of MAST, and shows that such an algorithm can retrieve matches that are subjectively better than matches based on matching the category of people's historical offers or requests to the category of a current transaction request.