Financial technology (fintech) has a growing impact on economic and social participation due to the increasing adoption of online banking and digital payments in everyday life. As fintech interests emerge in academic and industry work across the globe, critical needs and opportunities arise for ASSETS communities to lead and shape the discourse on accessible fintech. This workshop will bring together a diverse group of researchers and practitioners interested in developing a research agenda on designing accessible and inclusive fintech. We will take a timely step towards building a community to support continued discussion on the complex cultural and social contexts around fintech.

Although older adults are motivated to engage in physical activity, their routines are often disrupted by a multitude of interrelated barriers, which are not addressed by current physical activity promoting technologies. To explore how technology might be better designed to promote physical activity in older adults living alone, we developed 15 design concepts envisioning digital and non-digital tools for supporting older adults in maintaining physical activity routines and then interviewed 15 participants on their preferences and reactions to the concepts. In this poster, we share preliminary findings on our participants’ reactions to the designs. While generally positive towards all concepts, participants identified most with a design aimed at providing alternative exercises in response to a health-related routine disruption and least with two concepts, which both involved sharing activity logs with others. As social accountability is a common feature of commercial tools, our findings help shed light on why existing physical activity promoting technologies have been critiqued by older adults as poorly aligned with their needs, further reinforcing calls for considering their unique needs for physical activity support.

Traditional topic-specific communication boards for Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) require manual programming of relevant symbolic vocabulary, which is time-consuming and often impractical even for experienced Speech-Language Pathologists (SLPs). While recent research has demonstrated the potential to automatically generate these boards from photographs using artificial intelligence, there has been no exploration on how to design such tools to support the specific needs of AAC-based language instruction. This paper introduces QuickPic, a mobile AAC application co-designed with SLPs and special educators, aimed at enhancing language learning for non-speaking individuals, such as autistic children. Through a 17-month design process, we uncover the unique design features required to provide timely language support in therapy and special education contexts. We present emerging evidence on the overall satisfaction of SLPs using QuickPic, and on the advantages of large language model-based generation compared to the existing technique for automated vocabulary from photographs for AAC.

Older adults, especially those living alone, are less likely to meet recommended physical activity levels than other age groups. However, current physical activity promoting technologies have seen low uptake among older adults, likely due to poor attention to their unique needs. To understand the perspectives of older adults living alone towards physical activity, including their motivations for and the challenges encountered in maintaining routines, we conducted a qualitative study with 17 participants. Through thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews and diaries, we reveal their diverse motivations for engaging in physical activity while also detailing how their intentions and routines are habitually disrupted by multidimensional and interrelated barriers, including changing personal and environmental circumstances, lack of stimulus to maintaining motivation, and limited access to resources. We suggest future PA promoting technologies to leverage social interaction to develop commitments and employ a holistic design approach to addressing the interplay between the barriers.

In this article, we present a novel approach to quantitative evaluation of a model for parsing web pages as visual images, intended to provide improvements for users with assistive needs (cognitive or visual deficits, enabling decluttering or zooming and supporting more effective screen reader output). This segmentation-classification pipeline is tested in stages: We first discuss the validation of the segmentation algorithm, showing that our approach produces automated segmentations that are very similar to those produced by real users when making use of a drawing interface to designate edges and regions. We also examine the properties of these ground truth segmentations produced under different conditions. We then describe our Hidden Markov tree approach for classification and present results which serve provide important validation for this model. The analysis is set against effective choices for dataset and pruning options, measured with respect to manual ground truth labelling of regions. In all, we offer a detailed quantitative validation (focused on complex news pages) of a fully pipelined approach for interpreting web pages as visual images, an approach which enables important advances for users with assistive needs.

Traditional symbol-based AAC devices impose meta-linguistic and memory demands on individuals with complex communication needs and hinder conversation partners from stimulating symbolic language in meaningful moments. This work presents a prototype application that generates situation-specific communication boards formed by a combination of descriptive, narrative, and semantic related words and phrases inferred automatically from photographs. Through semi-structured interviews with AAC professionals, we investigate how this prototype was used to support communication and language learning in naturalistic school and therapy settings. We find that the immediacy of vocabulary reduces conversation partners’ workload, opens up opportunities for AAC stimulation, and facilitates symbolic understanding and sentence construction. We contribute a nuanced understanding of how vocabularies generated automatically from photographs can support individuals with complex communication needs in using and learning symbolic AAC, offering insights into the design of automatic vocabulary generation methods and interfaces to better support various scenarios of use and goals.

AAC research has traditionally focused on input speed, leaving higher-level communication goals such as relational maintenance under-explored. Through semi-structured interviews with AAC users with motor and speech impairments and their primary family caregivers, we offer a nuanced understanding of AAC’s roles in maintaining close relationships. Our inductive analysis reveals emerging themes including how AAC users and their partners share the physical and mental workload to overcome communication barriers in complex situations. Our deductive application of the Relational Maintenance Strategies framework exposes the efforts made and the challenges encountered in managing social engagements, providing mutual support, and decoding implicit expressions. From these insights, we propose novel research directions for better supporting maintenance strategies and social purposes of communication, including notably mediating relational tensions, leveraging empowerment and identity, and supporting interactions for social closeness and etiquette, which we hope will motivate discussion in HCI communities on expanding AAC research space.

Mauricio Fontana de Vargas, Karyn Moffatt. Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2021.

Best practices for conducting HCI research on dementia care increasingly involve multiple stakeholders and incorporate diverse viewpoints. When done effectively, involving proxy stakeholders such as family members and professionals can help bring forward the voices of people with dementia. However, concrete practical guidance for navigating the challenges of integrating different perspectives is lacking. We critically reflect on our own recent qualitative fieldwork involving participants with dementia, family caregivers, and facilitators at a local social program for people with dementia, re-examining our interview transcripts and observation notes through content analysis. We illustrate practical approaches to prioritizing participants’ voices through concrete excerpts that demonstrate strategies for better managing dynamics, intervening effectively, and engaging all stakeholders in the research process. Our reflections and proposed guidelines can benefit HCI researchers and practitioners working with vulnerable populations. We hope this work will spur further discussion and critique to strengthen and improve research practices in this domain.

Technology adoption among older adults has increased significantly in recent years. Yet, as new technologies proliferate and the demographics of aging shift, continued attention to older adults’ adoption priorities and learning preferences is required. Through semi-structured interviews, we examine the factors adults 65+ prioritize in choosing new technologies, the challenges they encounter in learning to use them, and the human and material resources they employ to support these efforts. Using a video prototype as a design probe, we present scenarios to explore older adults’ perceptions of adoption and learning new technologies within the lens of health management support, a relevant and beneficial context for older adults. Our results reveal that participants appreciated self-paced learning, remote support, and flexible learning methods, and were less reliant on instruction manuals than in the past. This work provides insight into older adults’ evolving challenges, learning needs, and design opportunities for next generation learning support.

People with dementia face major challenges in maintaining active social interaction. Designing digital tools for social sharing within families and care facilities has been well explored by HCI research, but comparatively less work has considered community settings. Situated in a community-based program for storytelling and socializing, our field observations and semi-structured interviews with people living with early-middle stage dementia, family caregivers, and program facilitators illustrate both positive and challenging aspects of social activities. We contribute a nuanced understanding of participants' social lives and identify four factors that aid in achieving positive outcomes: effective agencies for social interaction, normalized and friendly environments, collaboration and teamwork, and mediating social cues and communication. Finally, we examine our findings through the lens of past HCI work and offer insights for designing new social technologies to diversify the range of social spaces in community settings, through expanding peer collaboration, leveraging physical and virtual spaces, creating open-ended experiences, and developing flexible platforms.

Many digital technologies, such as social media, community systems, and public displays, have been studied to explore how people engage with each other in their community. Yet little is known about how one form of technology, location-based games (LBGs), can support urban residents in community awareness, city exploration, and placemaking as they navigate spaces and places in their cities. To explore this topic, we investigated the challenges urban residents faced in finding information about their community along a transit network. We then designed, developed, and evaluated an LBG called City Explorer that supports city exploration using gamification and the viewing and sharing of community information. We found that residents valued the fun, competition, and rewards afforded through play in public spaces, creating opportunities for placemaking through location services and knowledge sharing. Players also wanted additional knowledge about their transit commutes, including data about the frequency and routines of their transit rides. Collectively, such ridership data offers potential for smart city initiatives and illustrates that careful design considerations are required to balance people’s needs for play, personal data, privacy, and community information acquisition.

A rapid proliferation of specialized consumer tech gadgets (e.g., Fitbits) demands attention to the challenges that individuals face in learning to use them. Help Kiosk (HK) was initially conceived to support older adults in independently learning to use a smartphone, but it was only ever examined for this one context. Its design also required users to divide their attention between different areas of an augmented display and their smartphone. We introduce HK 2.0, which leverages a 40" tabletop display to integrate support into one visual space, while also supporting older adults in learning how to use multiple smart devices that must be configured to work together (e.g., a smartwatch synched to a tablet). Our new system also builds on the self-directed learning environment of the initial HK by introducing a collaborative learning feature to provide remote support by family and friends. We share the design of HK 2.0, including design requirements, features, and learning topics.

Controlled studies of touchscreen input performance for users with upper body motor impairments remain relatively sparse. To address this gap, we present a controlled lab study of mouse vs. touchscreen performance with 32 participants (16 with upper body motor impairments and 16 without). Our study examines: (1) how touch input compares to an indirect pointing device (a mouse); (2) how performance compares across a range of standard interaction techniques; and (3) how these answers differ for users with and without motor impairments. While the touchscreen was faster than the mouse overall, only participants without motor impairments benefited from a lower error rate on the touchscreen. Indeed, participants with motor impairments had a three-fold increase in pointing (tapping) errors on the touchscreen compared to the mouse. Our findings also highlight the high frequency of spurious touches for users with motor impairments and update past accessibility recommendations for minimum touchscreen target sizes to at least 18mm.

Research on the viability of using crowdsourcing for HCI performance experiments has concluded that online results are similar to those achieved in the lab---at least for desktop interactions. However, mobile devices, the most popular form of online access today, may be more problematic due to variability in the user's posture and in movement of the device. To assess this possibility, we conducted two experiments with 30 lab-based and 303 crowdsourced participants using basic mouse and touchscreen tasks. Our findings show that: (1) separately analyzing the crowd and lab data yields different study conclusions-touchscreen input was significantly less error prone than mouse input in the lab but more error prone online; (2) age-matched crowdsourced participants were significantly faster and less accurate than their lab-based counterparts, contrasting past work; (3) variability in mobile device movement and orientation increased as experimenter control decreased--a potential factor affecting the touchscreen error differences. This study cautions against assuming that crowdsourced data for performance experiments will directly reflect lab-based data, particularly for mobile devices.

In this article, we explore our role and ethical obligations as human–computer interaction (HCI) researchers who operate in, and design for, sensitive settings. Recognizing a lack of clear ethical direction from any one code of ethics (COE), we analyze across COEs offered by the professional associations related to our team's research backgrounds to develop a framework for exploring ethical dilemmas in HCI research. While the individual COE tended to be overly specific and prescriptive, our framework highlights common concerns, applicable to a broad range of contexts. We then apply this framework to reflect on two ethical dilemmas, we faced during our work with hospice patients and their families. Through this exercise, we demonstrate how the framework can be applied to ethical dilemmas in HCI research. Draws attention to the ethical subtleties of HCI research in sensitive settings Reflects on the role of professional codes of ethics in research design and practice Analyzes professional codes of ethics to create a framework for ethical reflection Illustrates how the framework can be applied to ethical dilemmas in HCI research

Current symbol-based dictionaries providing vocabulary support for persons with the language disorder, aphasia, are housed on smartphones or other portable devices. To employ the support on these external devices requires the user to divert their attention away from their conversation partner, to the neglect of conversation dynamics like eye contact or verbal inflection. A prior study investigated head-worn displays (HWDs) as an alternative form factor for supporting glanceable, unobtrusive, and always-available conversation support, but it did not directly compare the HWD to a control condition. To address this limitation, we compared vocabulary support on a HWD to equivalent support on a smartphone in terms of overall experience, perceived focus, and conversational success. Lastly, we elicited critical discussion of how each device might be better designed for conversation support. Our work contributes (1) evidence that a HWD can support more efficient communication, (2) preliminary results that a HWD can provide a better overall experience using assistive vocabulary, and (3) a characterization of the design features persons with aphasia value in portable conversation support technologies. Our findings should motivate further work on head-worn conversation support for persons with aphasia.

In this paper we present an overview of our proposed algorithms for classifying regions of web pages based on content and visual properties. We show how hidden Markov trees may be effective for the classification and how this may end up offering improved experiences to users who are trying to view webpages.

Symbol-based dictionaries of text, images and sound can help individuals with aphasia find the words they need, but are often seen as a last resort because they tend to replace rather than augment the user's natural speech. Through two design investigations, we explore head-worn displays as a means of providing unobtrusive, always-available, and glanceable vocabulary support. The first study used narrative storyboards as a design probe to explore the potential benefits and challenges of a head-worn approach over traditional augmented alternative communication (AAC) tools. The second study then evaluated a proof-of-concept prototype in both a lab setting with the researcher and in situ with unfamiliar conversation partners at a local market. Findings suggest that a head-worn approach could better allow wearers to maintain focus on the conversation, reduce reliance on the availability of external tools (e.g., paper and pen) or people, and minimize visibility of the support by others. These studies should motivate further investigation of head-worn conversational support.

Hospice is a medical setting for patients with terminal illnesses where active treatment is withdrawn in favor of providing comfort and dignity at the end of life. Providing comfort extends beyond managing physical pain to include social, emotional, spiritual, and environmental aspects of care. We studied technology's role in achieving these multifaceted dimensions of comfort through interviews with 16 family members of past hospice patients. Comfort was an ongoing pursuit, requiring the involvement of diverse stakeholders; communication technologies were selectively chosen in service of this achievement. We provide opportunities and recommendations for technologies in hospice, including the need for varying degrees of richness and symmetry, and for support for life-affirming acts. To our knowledge, this constitutes the first study, in the CSCW and HCI literatures, of communication technology use during the final days of a person's life, with implications both for hospice and for the end of life more broadly.

Many people cannot communicate effectively with those around them. The causes vary but several tools and strategies can support their communication. These tools, which collectively fall under the banner of Assistive and Augmentative Communication (AAC), are rarely adaptive. Of those that are, few provide context-based or just-in-time vocabulary support to users even though the proliferation of smartphones makes this possible. To meet this need, we developed four algorithms to retrieve relevant vocabulary from Internet-based corpora. We used discourse completion tasks to evaluate each algorithm's ability to identify appropriate vocabulary across a set of specific contexts. The results indicate that our approach identifies appropriate context-specific words that complement general AAC vocabularies: when combined with a typical base vocabulary, the algorithms outperformed the support provided by the base vocabulary alone. They did this by adding small targeted vocabularies.

Tablet PCs are gaining popularity but many older adults still struggle with pointing, particularly with two error types: missing, landing and lifting outside the target bounds; and slipping, landing on the target, but slipping off before lifting. To solve these problems, we examined the feasibility of extending and combining existing techniques designed for younger users and the mouse, focusing our investigation on the Bubble cursor and Steady Clicks techniques. Through a laboratory experiment with younger and older adults, we showed that both techniques can be adapted for use in a pen interface, and that combining the two techniques provides greater support than either technique on its own. Though our results were especially pertinent to the older group, both ages benefited from the designs. We also found that technique performance depended on task context. From these findings we established guidelines for technique selection.

We introduce ephemeral adaptation, a new adaptive GUI technique that improves performance by reducing visual search time while maintaining spatial consistency. Ephemeral adaptive interfaces employ gradual onset to draw the user's attention to predicted items: adaptively predicted items appear abruptly when the menu is opened, but non-predicted items fade in gradually. To demonstrate the benefit of ephemeral adaptation we conducted two experiments with a total of 48 users to show: (1) that ephemeral adaptive menus are faster than static menus when accuracy is high, and are not significantly slower when it is low and (2) that ephemeral adaptive menus are also faster than adaptive highlighting. While we focused on user-adaptive GUIs, ephemeral adaptation should be applicable to a broad range of visually complex tasks.

Tablet PCs are gaining popularity, but many users, particularly older ones, still struggle with pen-based interaction. One type of error, drifting, occurs when users accidentally hover over an adjacent menu, causing their focus menu to close and the adjacent one to open. In this paper, we propose two approaches to address drifting. The first, tap, requires an explicit tap to switch menus, and thus, eliminates the possibility of a drift. The second, glide, uses a distance threshold to delay switching, and thereby reduce the likelihood of a drift. We performed a comparative evaluation of our approaches with a control interface. Tap was effective at reducing drifts for both groups, but it was only popular among older users. Glide surprisingly did not show any performance improvement. Additional research is needed to determine if the negative findings for glide are a result of the particular threshold used, or reflect a fundamental flaw in the glide approach.

This paper presents the results of a study to gather information on the underlying causes of pen -based target acquisition difficulty. In order to observe both simple and complex interaction, two tasks (menu and Fitts' tapping) were used. Thirty-six participants across three age groups (18-54, 54-69, and 70-85) were included to draw out both general shortcomings of targeting, and those difficulties unique to older users. Three primary sources of target acquisition difficulty were identified: slipping off the target, drifting unexpectedly from one menu to the next, and missing a menu selection by selecting the top edge of the item below. Based on these difficulties, we then evolved several designs for improving pen-based target acquisition. An additional finding was that including older users as participants allowed us to uncover pen-interaction deficiencies that we would likely have missed otherwise.

Slipping while clicking and accidental clicks are a source of errors for mouse users with motor impairments. The Steady Clicks assistance feature suppresses these errors by freezing the cursor during mouse clicks, preventing overlapping button presses and suppressing clicks made while the mouse is moving at a high velocity. Evaluation with eleven target users found that Steady Clicks enabled participants to select targets using significantly fewer attempts. Overall task performance times were significantly improved for the five participants with the highest slip rates. Blocking of overlapping and high velocity clicks also shows promise as an error filter. Nine participants preferred Steady Clicks to the unassisted condition. If used in conjunction with existing techniques for cursor positioning, all of the major sources of clicking errors observed in empirical studies would be addressed, enabling faster and more effective mouse use for those who currently struggle with the standard mouse.

In this paper, we describe the design and preliminary evaluation of a hybrid desktop-handheld system developed to support individuals with aphasia, a disorder which impairs the ability to speak, read, write, or understand language. The system allows its users to develop speech communication through images and sound on a desktop computer and download this speech to a mobile device that can then support communication outside the home. Using a desktop computer for input addresses some of this population's difficulties interacting with handheld devices, while the mobile device addresses stigma and portability issues. A modified participatory design approach was used in which proxies, that is, speech-language pathologists who work with aphasic individuals, assumed the role normally filled by users. This was done because of the difficulties in communicating with the target population and the high variability in aphasic disorders. In addition, the paper presents a case study of the proxy-use participatory design process that illustrates how different interview techniques resulted in different user feedback.

Cooking is a daily activity for many people. However, traditional text recipes are often prohibitively difficult to follow for people with language disorders, such as aphasia. We have developed a multi-modal application that leverages the retained ability of aphasic individuals to recognize image-based representations of objects, providing a presentation format that can be more easily followed than a traditional text recipe. Through a systematic approach to developing a visual language for cooking, and the subsequent case study evaluation of a prototype developed according to this language, we show that a combination of visual instructions and navigational structure can help individuals with relatively large language deficits to cook more independently.

Aphasia is a cognitive disorder that impairs speech and language. From interviews with aphasic individuals, their caregivers, and speech-language pathologists, the need was identified for a daily planner that allows aphasic users to independently manage their appointments. We used a participatory design approach to develop ESI Planner (the Enhanced with Sound and Images Planner) for use on a PDA and subsequently evaluated it in a lab study. This methodology was used in order to achieve both usable and adoptable technology. In addition to describing our experience in designing ESI Planner, two main contributions are provided: general guidelines for working with special populations in the development of technology, and design guidelines for accessible handheld technology.