Audio Description (AD) provides essential access to visual media for blind and low vision (BLV) audiences. Yet current AD production tools remain largely inaccessible to BLV video creators, who possess valuable expertise but face barriers due to visually-driven interfaces. We present ADCanvas, a multimodal authoring system that supports non-visual control over audio description (AD) creation. ADCanvas combines conversational interaction with keyboard-based playback control and a plain-text, screen reader–accessible editor to support end-to-end AD authoring and visual question answering (VQA). Combining screen-reader-friendly controls with a multimodal LLM agent, ADCanvas supports live VQA, script generation, and AD modification. Through a user study with 12 BLV video creators, we find that users adopt the conversational agent as an informational aide and drafting assistant, while maintaining agency through verification and editing. For example, participants saw themselves as curators who received information from the model and filtered it down for their audience. Our findings offer design implications for accessible media tools, including precise editing controls, accessibility support for creative ideation, and configurable rules for human-AI collaboration.

On-demand, last-mile delivery -- the transportation of goods from a local distribution center to the customer's door within a specified time window -- is used by people with disabilities (PwDs) for a variety of reasons. While delivery robots have potential in this space, they often widen disparities in access for PwDs. Inspired by the concept of pluriversality, which embraces the diversity of worldviews, we facilitated participatory design workshops with PwDs to co-design accessible and equitable delivery robots. Our findings support the importance of delivery robots with varied form factors that are robust and customizable to support diverse PwDs and their respective needs and preferences. We also provide broader considerations for automation in delivery ecosystems.

We explore large language model (LLM) responses that may negatively impact the transgender and nonbinary (TGNB) community and introduce the Transing Transformers Toolkit, T^3, which provides resources for identifying such harmful response behaviors. The heart of T^3 is a community-centred taxonomy of harms, developed in collaboration with the TGNB community, which we complement with, amongst other guidance, suggested heuristics for evaluation. To develop the taxonomy, we adopted a multi-method approach that included surveys and focus groups with community experts. The contribution highlights the importance of community-centred approaches in mitigating harm, and outlines pathways for LLM developers to improve how their models handle TGNB-related topics.

Accessibility research has a broad mandate: use technology to make the world more accessible to disabled people. Yet, as a field, accessibility research lacks a clear characterization of what "accessibility" is. Furthermore, it has been historically limited in who is designed for, focusing on specific types of disability and often failing to consider how disability intersects with other identities. We set out to explicate what it means to make something accessible, grounded in the lived experiences of a diverse group of 25 disabled people. From our empirical findings, we develop a process for modeling accessibility. First, an individual assesses their experience of inaccess, specifically, the type of barrier they face, the technology repertoire they possess, and the contextual factors that shape how they address accessibility barriers. Then, having assessed an access barrier, they perform consequence calculus, weighing all available options to achieve access and deciding upon the option that best matches their priorities. We highlight the situated nature of access; people's identities, contextual factors, repertoires, and priorities all dictate their experience of accessibility.

Generative AI (GAI) is proliferating, and among its many applications are to support creative work (e.g., generating text, images, music) and to enhance accessibility (e.g., captions of images and audio). As GAI evolves, creatives must consider how (or how not) to incorporate these tools into their practices. In this paper, we present interviews at the intersection of these applications. We learned from 10 creatives with disabilities who intentionally use and do not use GAI in and around their creative work. Their mediums ranged from audio engineering to leatherwork, and they collectively experienced a variety of disabilities, from sensory to motor to invisible disabilities. We share cross-cutting themes of their access hacks, how creative practice and access work become entangled, and their perspectives on how GAI should and should not fit into their workflows. In turn, we offer qualities of accessible creativity with responsible AI that can inform future research.

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.

This paper reports on disability representation in images output from text-to-image (T2I) generative AI systems. Through eight focus groups with 25 people with disabilities, we found that models repeatedly presented reductive archetypes for different disabilities. Often these representations reflected broader societal stereotypes and biases, which our participants were concerned to see reproduced through T2I. Our participants discussed further challenges with using these models including the current reliance on prompt engineering to reach satisfactorily diverse results. Finally, they offered suggestions for how to improve disability representation with solutions like showing multiple, heterogeneous images for a single prompt and including the prompt with images generated. Our discussion reflects on tensions and tradeoffs we found among the diverse perspectives shared to inform future research on representation-oriented generative AI system evaluation metrics and development processes.

"Scene description" applications that describe visual content in a photo are useful daily tools for blind and low vision (BLV) people. Researchers have studied their use, but they have only explored those that leverage remote sighted assistants; little is known about applications that use AI to generate their descriptions. Thus, to investigate their use cases, we conducted a two-week diary study where 16 BLV participants used an AI-powered scene description application we designed. Through their diary entries and follow-up interviews, users shared their information goals and assessments of the visual descriptions they received. We analyzed the entries and found frequent use cases, such as identifying visual features of known objects, and surprising ones, such as avoiding contact with dangerous objects. We also found users scored the descriptions relatively low on average, 2.76 out of 5 (SD=1.49) for satisfaction and 2.43 out of 4 (SD=1.16) for trust, showing that descriptions still need significant improvements to deliver satisfying and trustworthy experiences. We discuss future opportunities for AI as it becomes a more powerful accessibility tool for BLV users.

Accessibility research strives to develop technology that is useful for disabled people, but the research processes that we engage in do not always center disabled people in a way that allows us to shape artifacts so that they benefit disabled communities. In this workshop, we want to address core questions that are relevant in this context: How can research questions be defined in a way that shares power between research teams and technology users? How should research processes be designed to be broadly accessible for disabled people? And what are equitable ways of summarizing and sharing research findings in a way that allows disabled communities to critically appraise findings with us? Through discussion among all attendees, we want to develop a practical guide in disability-centered research that will be made available and further developed as a community resource when engaging in accessibility research.

Ethnic community-based organizations (CBOs) play an essential role in supporting the wellbeing of immigrants and refugees. CBO workers often act as linguistic and cultural translators between communities, government, and health and social service systems. However, resource constraints, technological barriers, and pressures to be data-driven require workers to perform additional forms of translation to ensure their organizations’ survival. Drawing on 16 interviews with members of 7 Asian American and Pacific Islander CBOs, we examine opportunities and barriers concerning their technology-mediated work practices. We identify two circumstances where CBO workers perform translation: (1) as legitimacy work to build trust with funders and communities, and (2) as (re)mediation in attending to technological barriers and resisting hegemonic systems that treat their communities as “other.” By unpacking the politics of translation work across these sites, we position CBO workers as a critical source for HCI research and practice as it seeks to support community wellbeing.

Methods are fundamental to doing research and can directly impact who is included in scientific advances. Given accessibility research's increasing popularity and pervasive barriers to conducting and participating in research experienced by people with disabilities, it is critical to ask how methods are made accessible. Yet papers rarely describe their methods in detail. This paper reports on 17 interviews with accessibility experts about how they include both facilitators and participants with disabilities in popular user research methods. Our findings offer strategies for anticipating access needs while remaining flexible and responsive to unexpected access barriers. We emphasize the importance of considering accessibility at all stages of the research process, and contextualize access work in recent disability and accessibility literature. We explore how technology or processes could reflect a norm of accessibility. Finally, we discuss how various needs intersect and conflict and offer a practical structure for planning accessible research.

Few images on the Web receive alt-text descriptions that would make them accessible to blind and low vision (BLV) users.Imagebased NLG systems have progressed to the point where they can begin to address this persistent societal problem, but these systems will not be fully successful unless we evaluate them on metrics that guide their development correctly.Here, we argue against current referenceless metrics -those that don't rely on human-generated ground-truth descriptions -on the grounds that they do not align with the needs of BLV users.The fundamental shortcoming of these metrics is that they do not take context into account, whereas contextual information is highly valued by BLV users.To substantiate these claims, we present a study with BLV participants who rated descriptions along a variety of dimensions.An in-depth analysis reveals that the lack of context-awareness makes current referenceless metrics inadequate for advancing image accessibility.As a proof-of-concept, we provide a contextual version of the referenceless metric CLIPScore which begins to address the disconnect to the BLV data.

Abstract Novices and experts have struggled to evaluate the accessibility of data visualizations because there are no common shared guidelines across environments, platforms, and contexts in which data visualizations are authored. Between non‐specific standards bodies like WCAG, emerging research, and guidelines from specific communities of practice, it is hard to organize knowledge on how to evaluate accessible data visualizations. We present Chartability, a set of heuristics synthesized from these various sources which enables designers, developers, researchers, and auditors to evaluate data‐driven visualizations and interfaces for visual, motor, vestibular, neurological, and cognitive accessibility. In this paper, we outline our process of making a set of heuristics and accessibility principles for Chartability and highlight key features in the auditing process. Working with participants on real projects, we found that data practitioners with a novice level of accessibility skills were more confident and found auditing to be easier after using Chartability. Expert accessibility practitioners were eager to integrate Chartability into their own work. Reflecting on Chartability's development and the preliminary user evaluation, we discuss tradeoffs of open projects, working with high‐risk evaluations like auditing projects in the wild, and challenge future research projects at the intersection of visualization and accessibility to consider the broad intersections of disabilities.

Over the past several years, micromobility devices—small-scale, networked vehicles used to travel short distances—have begun to pervade cities, bringing promises of sustainable transportation and decreased congestion. Though proponents herald their role in offering lightweight solutions to disconnected transit, smart scooters and autonomous delivery robots increasingly occupy pedestrian pathways, reanimating tensions around the right to public space. Drawing on interviews with disabled activists, government officials, and commercial representatives, we chart how devices and policies co-evolve to fulfill municipal sustainability goals, while creating obstacles for people with disabilities whose activism has long resisted inaccessible infrastructure. We reflect on efforts to redistribute space, institute tech governance, and offer accountability to those who involuntarily encounter interventions on the ground. In studying micromobility within spatial and political context, we call for the HCI community to consider how innovation transforms as it moves out from centers of development toward peripheries of design consideration.

In this experience report, we offer a case study of blind and sighted colleagues creating an accessible workflow to collaborate on a data visualization-focused project. We outline our process for making the project's shared data representations accessible through incorporating both handmade and machine-embossed tactile graphics. We also share lessons and strategies for considering team needs and addressing contextual constraints like remote collaboration during the COVID-19 pandemic. More broadly, this report contributes to ongoing research into the ways accessibility is interdependent by arguing that access work must be a collective responsibility and properly supported with recognition, resources, and infrastructure.

Augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) devices enable speech-based communication, but generating speech is not the only resource needed to have a successful conversation. Being able to signal one wishes to take a turn by raising a hand or providing some other cue is critical in securing a turn to speak. Experienced conversation partners know how to recognize the nonverbal communication an augmented communicator (AC) displays, but these same nonverbal gestures can be hard to interpret by people who meet an AC for the first time. Prior work has identified motion-based AAC as a viable and underexplored modality for increasing ACs’ agency in conversation. We build on this prior work to dig deeper into a particular case study on motion-based AAC by co-designing a physical expressive object to support ACs during conversations. We found that our physical expressive object could support communication with unfamiliar partners. As such, we present our process and resulting lessons on the designed object itself and the co-design process.

Content creators are instructed to write textual descriptions of visual content to make it accessible; yet existing guidelines lack specifics on how to write about people’s appearance, particularly while remaining mindful of consequences of (mis)representation. In this paper, we report on interviews with screen reader users who were also Black, Indigenous, People of Color, Non-binary, and/or Transgender on their current image description practices and preferences, and experiences negotiating theirs and others’ appearances non-visually. We discuss these perspectives, and the ethics of humans and AI describing appearance characteristics that may convey the race, gender, and disabilities of those photographed. In turn, we share considerations for more carefully describing appearance, and contexts in which such information is perceived salient. Finally, we offer tensions and questions for accessibility research to equitably consider politics and ecosystems in which technologies will embed, such as potential risks of human and AI biases amplifying through image descriptions.

Tactile guiding surfaces in the built environment have held a contentious place in the process of navigation by people who are blind or visually impaired. Despite standards for tactile guiding surfaces, problems persist with inconsistent implementation, perception, and geographic orientation. We investigate the role of tactile cues in non-visual navigation and attitudes surrounding guiding surfaces through a survey of 67 people with vision impairments and ten interviews with navigation and public accessibility experts. Our participants revealed several opportunities to augment existing tactile surfaces while envisioning novel multimodal feedback solutions in immediately relevant contexts. We also propose an approach for designing and exploring low cost, multimodal tactile surfaces, which we call navtiles. Finally, we discuss practical aspects of implementation for new design alternatives such as standardization, installation, movability, discoverability, and a need for transparency. Collectively, these insights contribute to the production and implementation of novel multimodal navigation aids.

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced institutions to rapidly alter their behavior, which typically has disproportionate negative effects on people with disabilities as accessibility is overlooked. To investigate these issues, we analyzed Twitter data to examine accessibility problems surfaced by the crisis. We identified three key domains at the intersection of accessibility and technology: (i) the allocation of product delivery services, (ii) the transition to remote education, and (iii) the dissemination of public health information. We found that essential retailers expanded their high-risk customer shopping hours and pick-up and delivery services, but individuals with disabilities still lacked necessary access to goods and services. Long-experienced access barriers to online education were exacerbated by the abrupt transition of in-person to remote instruction. Finally, public health messaging has been inconsistent and inaccessible, which is unacceptable during a rapidly-evolving crisis. We argue that organizations should create flexible, accessible technology and policies in calm times to be adaptable in times of crisis to serve individuals with diverse needs.

Accessibility research and disability studies are intertwined fields focused on, respectively, building a world more inclusive of people with disability and understanding and elevating the lived experiences of disabled people. Accessibility research tends to focus on creating technology related to impairment, while disability studies focuses on understanding disability and advocating against ableist systems. Our paper presents a reflexive analysis of the experiences of three accessibility researchers and one disability studies scholar. We focus on moments when our disability was misunderstood and causes such as expecting clearly defined impairments. We derive three themes: ableism in research, oversimplification of disability, and human relationships around disability. From these themes, we suggest paths toward more strongly integrating disability studies perspectives and disabled people into accessibility research.

Current approaches to AI and Assistive Technology (AT) often foreground task completion over other encounters such as expressions of care. Our paper challenges and complements such task-completion approaches by attending to the care work of access-the continual affective and emotional adjustments that people make by noticing and attending to one another. We explore how this work impacts encounters among people with and without vision impairments who complete tasks together. We find that bound up in attempts to get things done are concerns for one another and how well people are doing together. Reading this work through emerging disability studies and feminist STS scholarship, we account for two important forms of work that give rise to access: (1) mundane attunements and (2) non-innocent authorizations. Together these processes work as sensitizing concepts to help HCI scholars account for the ways that intelligent ATs both produce access while sometimes subverting people with disabilities.

This paper aims to elevate stories of design by people with disabilities. In particular, we draw from counter-storytelling practices to build a corpus of stories that prioritize disabled people as contributors to professional design practice. Across a series of workshops with disabled activists, designers, and developers, we developed the concept of biographical prototypes: under-recognized first-person accounts of design materialized through prototyping practices. We describe how the creation of such prototypes helps position disabled people as central contributors to the design profession. The artifacts engendered an expanded sense of coalition among workshop participants while prompting reflection on tensions between recognition and obligation. We end by reflecting on how the prototypes-and the practices that produced them-complement a growing number of design activities around disability that reveal complexities around structural forms of discrimination and the generative role that personal accounts may play in their revision.

This pictorial engages with the concept of 'diversity' as it has been taken up in the current technology industry by companies such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter. Drawing on methods of design fiction, we use a visual parody of a fictional social media corporation to explore possible consequences of diversity efforts-both within industrial workplace settings and the platforms they produce. By outwardly foregrounding diversity through explicitly absurd presentations, our investigation uses humor and farce to draw attention to how such efforts further entrench the very forms of institutional racism, ableism, and sexism they are meant to disrupt; for example, by creating additional work for the people they are designed to include. We offer these visual explorations not to promote or discourage diversity efforts, but to help design researchers imagine what such efforts become when labor and unintended consequences go unaccounted.

The Maker movement promises access to activities from crafting to digital fabrication for anyone to invent and customize technology. But people with disabilities, who could benefit from Making, still encounter significant barriers to do so. In response, we share our personal experiences Making nonvisually and supporting its instruction. Specifically, we draw on examples from a series of workshops where we introduced Arduino to blind hobbyists and guided assembly of an accessible voltmeter prototype [24]. In so doing, we offer future directions for accessible Making research and application.

This paper examines the promise of empathy, the name commonly given to the initial phase of the human-centered design process in which designers seek to understand their intended users in order to inform technology development. By analyzing popular empathy activities aimed at understanding people with disabilities, we examine the ways empathy works to both powerfully and problematically align designers with the values of people who may use their products. Drawing on disability studies and feminist theorizing, we describe how acts of empathy building may further distance people with disabilities from the processes designers intend to draw them into. We end by reimagining empathy as guided by the lived experiences of people with disabilities who are traditionally positioned as those to be empathized.

As diversity efforts in computer science begin to recognize disabled programmers as an underrepresented group, we step back to chronicle the experiences of blind programmers in higher education. Through a survey and follow-up interviews with 10 blind programmers, we share reflections and barriers important for the computing education community to understand as we attempt to welcoming cultures for disabled programmers. Our findings illuminated a variety of barriers blind programmers faced in college and the impact that they had on their ability to succeed in the field. We found that barriers permeate all parts of these blind student's' education from accessing the materials and doing the homework to working with professors. These barriers increased feelings of the isolation, decreased motivation especially when tasks were inaccessible, and prevented them from learning all the concepts covered in their degree program.

In this paper, we describe interdependence for assistive technology design, a frame developed to complement the traditional focus on independence in the Assistive Technology field. Interdependence emphasizes collaborative access and people with disabilities' important and often understated contribution in these efforts. We lay the foundation of this frame with literature from the academic discipline of Disability Studies and popular media contributed by contemporary disability justice activists. Then, drawing on cases from our own work, we show how the interdependence frame (1) synthesizes findings from a growing body of research in the Assistive Technology field and (2) helps us orient to additional technology design opportunities. We position interdependence as one possible orientation to, not a prescription for, research and design practice--one that opens new design possibilities and affirms our commitment to equal access for people with disabilities.

We contribute a qualitative investigation of how teens with visual impairments (VIP) access smartphone photography, from the time they take photos through editing and sharing them on social media. We observed that they largely want to engage with photos visually, similarly to their sighted peers, and have developed strategies around photo capture, editing, sharing, and consumption that attempt to mitigate usability limitations of current photography and social media apps. We demonstrate the need for more work examining how young people with low vision engage with smartphone photography and social media, as they are heavy users of such technologies and have challenges distinct from their totally blind counterparts. We conclude with design considerations to alleviate the usability barriers we uncovered and for making smartphone photography and social media more accessible and relevant for VIPs.

As conversational agents and digital assistants become increasingly pervasive, understanding their synthetic speech becomes increasingly important. Simultaneously, speech synthesis is becoming more sophisticated and manipulable, providing the opportunity to optimize speech rate to save users time. However, little is known about people's abilities to understand fast speech. In this work, we provide the first large-scale study on human listening rates. Run on LabintheWild, it used volunteer participants, was screen reader accessible, and measured listening rate by accuracy at answering questions spoken by a screen reader at various rates. Our results show that blind and low-vision people, who often rely on audio cues and access text aurally, generally have higher listening rates than sighted people. The findings also suggest a need to expand the range of rates available on personal devices. These results demonstrate the potential for users to learn to listen to faster rates, expanding the possibilities for human-conversational agent interaction.

Alt text (short for "alternative text") is descriptive text associated with an image in HTML and other document formats. Screen reader technologies speak the alt text aloud to people who are visually impaired. Introduced with HTML 2.0 in 1995, the alt attribute has not evolved despite significant changes in technology over the past two decades. In light of the expanding volume, purpose, and importance of digital imagery, we reflect on how alt text could be supplemented to offer a richer experience of visual content to screen reader users. Our contributions include articulating the design space of representations of visual content for screen reader users, prototypes illustrating several points within this design space, and evaluations of several of these new image representations with people who are blind. We close by discussing the implications of our taxonomy, prototypes, and user study findings.

We present the results of an exploration to understand the accessibility of smartphone photography for people with motor impairments. We surveyed forty-six people and interviewed twelve people about capturing, editing, and sharing photographs on smartphones. We found that people with motor impairments encounter many challenges with smartphone photography, resulting in users capturing fewer photographs than they would like. Participants described various strategies they used to overcome challenges in order to capture a quality photograph. We also found that photograph quality plays a large role in deciding which photographs users share and how often they share, with most participants rating their photographs as average or poor quality compared to photos shared on their social networks. Additionally, we created design probes of two novel photography interfaces and received feedback from our interview participants about their usefulness and functionality. Based on our findings, we propose design recommendations for how to improve the accessibility of mobile photoware for people with motor impairments.

This research takes an orientation to visual impairment (VI) that does not regard it as fixed or determined alone in or through the body. Instead, we consider (dis)ability as produced through interactions with the environment and configured by the people and technology within it. Specifically, we explore how abilities become negotiated through video ethnography with six VI athletes and spectators during the Rio 2016 Paralympics. We use generated in-depth examples to identify how technology can be a meaningful part of ability negotiations, emphasizing how these embed into the social interactions and lives of people with VI. In contrast to treating technology as a solution to a 'sensory deficit', we understand it to support the triangulation process of sense-making through provision of appropriate additional information. Further, we suggest that technology should not try and replace human assistance, but instead enable people with VI to better identify and interact with other people in-situ.

Traditional virtual reality (VR) mainly focuses on visual feedback, which is not accessible for people with visual impairments. We created Canetroller, a haptic cane controller that simulates white cane interactions, enabling people with visual impairments to navigate a virtual environment by transferring their cane skills into the virtual world. Canetroller provides three types of feedback: (1) physical resistance generated by a wearable programmable brake mechanism that physically impedes the controller when the virtual cane comes in contact with a virtual object; (2) vibrotactile feedback that simulates the vibrations when a cane hits an object or touches and drags across various surfaces; and (3) spatial 3D auditory feedback simulating the sound of real-world cane interactions. We designed indoor and outdoor VR scenes to evaluate the effectiveness of our controller. Our study showed that Canetroller was a promising tool that enabled visually impaired participants to navigate different virtual spaces. We discuss potential applications supported by Canetroller ranging from entertainment to mobility training.

Academic research can offer insights for HCI practitioners, yet past work shows that research findings are rarely used in industry. We interviewed 22 design practitioners to identify why they do not use academic research and why and how they use other resources at work. We contribute recommendations for the design of translational resources to bridge the gap between theory and practice in HCI. We recommend ways to create theory-driven examples tailored to specific activities: understanding, brainstorming, building, and advocacy. Additionally, practitioners prefer actionable guidance and see prescriptive recommendations and downloadable design patterns as most useful. Design-oriented filters, support for mapping design challenges to research keywords, and visual galleries of examples from theory have the potential to facilitate designers' search processes. Finally, translational resources and discussion features can be integrated into tools for designers and academics to support cross-community collaboration.

Research advancements allow computational systems to automatically caption social media images. Often, these captions are evaluated with sighted humans using the image as a reference. Here, we explore how blind and visually impaired people experience these captions in two studies about social media images. Using a contextual inquiry approach (n=6 blind/visually impaired), we found that blind people place a lot of trust in automatically generated captions, filling in details to resolve differences between an image's context and an incongruent caption. We built on this in-person study with a second, larger online experiment (n=100 blind/visually impaired) to investigate the role of phrasing in encouraging trust or skepticism in captions. We found that captions emphasizing the probability of error, rather than correctness, encouraged people to attribute incongruence to an incorrect caption, rather than missing details. Where existing research has focused on encouraging trust in intelligent systems, we conclude by challenging this assumption and consider the benefits of encouraging appropriate skepticism.

In this work, we sought to understand the experiences and disability disclosure preferences of adults with and without disabilities who have dated online. Our 91 survey respondents expressed varying opinions about the need for potential partners to disclose disability status when online dating depending on the nature or perceived severity, with "visible" disabilities carrying a higher expectation of upfront disclosure than "invisible" disabilities. Many disabled respondents also described proactively disclosing as a technique to filter potential connections. Our findings suggest that individuals with disabilities must perform additional labor and navigate complex group norms in pursuit of personal connection. We advocate that the social computing research community consider how these processes are driven by both societal expectation and the constraints of online dating platforms. We then offer design considerations and open questions as a means to extend social computing study at the intersection of online dating and disability studies.

Although a critical step in the technology design process, ideation is often not accessible for people with disabilities. We present findings from a design workshop facilitated to brainstorm accessible ideation methods. Groups, mostly engineers, ideated on a design challenge and documented access barriers encountered by participants with disabilities. They then ideated and prototyped potential solutions for decreasing access barriers. We offer suggestions for more accessible communication and ideation on a design team and insights from using a workshop as a site for rethinking ideation.

Despite practices addressing disability in design and advocating user-centered design (UCD) approaches, popular mainstream technologies remain largely inaccessible for people with disabilities. We conducted a design course study investigating how student designers regard disability and explored how designing for both disabled and non-disabled users encouraged students to think about accessibility throughout the design process. Students focused on a design project while learning UCD concepts and techniques, working with people with and without disabilities throughout the project. We found that designing for both disabled and non-disabled users surfaced challenges and tensions in finding solutions to satisfy both groups, influencing students' attitudes toward accessible design. In addressing these tensions, non-functional aspects of accessible design emerged as important complements to functional aspects for users with and without disabilities.

This paper is about the aspects of ability, selfhood, and normalcy embodied in people's relationships with prostheses. Drawing on interviews with 14 individuals with upper-limb loss and diverse experiences with prostheses, we find people not only choose to use and not use prosthesis throughout their lives but also form close and complex relationships with them. The design of "assistive" technology often focuses on enhancing function; however, we found that prostheses played important roles in people's development of identity and sense of normalcy. Even when a prosthesis failed functionally, such as was the case with 3D-printed prostheses created by an on-line open-source maker community (e-NABLE), we found people still praised the design and initiative because of the positive impacts on popular culture, identity, and community building. This work surfaces crucial questions about the role of design interventions in identity production, the promise of maker communities for accelerating innovation, and a broader definition of "assistive" technology.

Textbook figures are often converted into a tactile format for access by blind students. These figures are not truly accessible unless the text within the figures is also made accessible. A common solution to access text in a tactile image is to use embossed Braille. We have developed an alternative to Braille that uses QR codes for students who want tactile graphics, but prefer the text in figures be spoken, rather than in Braille. Tactile Graphics with a Voice (TGV) allows text within tactile graphics to be accessible by using a talking QR code reader app on a smartphone. To evaluate TGV, we performed a longitudinal study where ten blind and low vision participants were asked to complete tasks using three alternative picture taking guidance techniques: 1) no guidance, 2) verbal guidance, and 3) finger pointing guidance. Our results show that TGV is an effective way to access text in tactile graphics, especially for those blind users who are not fluent in Braille. In addition, guidance preferences varied with each of the guidance techniques being preferred by at least one participant.

Textbook images are converted into tactile graphics to be made accessible to blind and low vision students. The text labels on these graphics are an important part of the image and must be made accessible as well. The graphics usually have the labels embossed in Braille. However, there are some blind and low vision students who cannot read Braille and need to be able to access the labels in a different manner. We present Tactile Graphics with a Voice, a system that encodes the labels in QR codes, which can be read aloud using the application, TGV, we developed. TGV provides feedback to support the user in scanning the QR code and allows the user to select which QR code to scan when multiple are close together.

Locating bus stops, particularly in unfamiliar areas, can present challenges to people who are blind or low vision. At the same time, new information technology such as smart phones and mobile devices have enabled them to undertake a much greater range of activities with increased independence. We focus on the intersection of these issues. We developed and deployed StopInfo, a system for public transit riders that provides very detailed information about bus stops with the goal of helping riders find and verify bus stop locations. We augmented internal information from a major transit agency in the Seattle area with information entered by the community, primarily as they waited at these stops. Additionally, we conducted a five week field study with six blind and low vision participants to gauge usage patterns and determine values related to independent travel. We found that StopInfo was received positively and is generally usable. Furthermore, the system supports tenets of independence; participants took public transit trips that they might not have attempted otherwise. Lastly, an audit of bus stops in three Seattle neighborhoods found that information from both the transit agency and the community was accurate.

There are many educational smartphone games for children, but few are accessible to blind children. We present BraillePlay, a suite of accessible games for smartphones that teach Braille character encodings to promote Braille literacy. The BraillePlay games are based on VBraille, a method for displaying Braille characters on a smartphone. BraillePlay includes four games of varying levels of difficulty: VBReader and VBWriter simulate Braille flashcards, and VBHangman and VBGhost incorporate Braille character identification and recall into word games. We evaluated BraillePlay with a longitudinal study in the wild with eight blind children. Through logged usage data and extensive interviews, we found that all but one participant were able to play the games independently and found them enjoyable. We also found evidence that some children learned Braille concepts. We distill implications for the design of games for blind children and discuss lessons learned.

Low-vision and blind bus riders often rely on known physical landmarks to help locate and verify bus stop locations (e.g., by searching for a shelter, bench, newspaper bin). However, there are currently few, if any, methods to determine this information a priori via computational tools or services. In this paper, we introduce and evaluate a new scalable method for collecting bus stop location and landmark descriptions by combining online crowdsourcing and Google Street View (GSV). We conduct and report on three studies in particular: (i) a formative interview study of 18 people with visual impairments to inform the design of our crowdsourcing tool; (ii) a comparative study examining differences between physical bus stop audit data and audits conducted virtually with GSV; and (iii) an online study of 153 crowd workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk to examine the feasibility of crowdsourcing bus stop audits using our custom tool with GSV. Our findings reemphasize the importance of landmarks in non-visual navigation, demonstrate that GSV is a viable bus stop audit dataset, and show that minimally trained crowd workers can find and identify bus stop landmarks with 82.5% accuracy across 150 bus stop locations (87.3% with simple quality control).

We present VBGhost: an accessible, educational smartphone game for people who are blind or low vision. It is based on the word game Ghost, in which players take turns adding letters to a word fragment while attempting to not complete a word. VBGhost uses audio and haptic feedback to reinforce Braille concepts. Players enter letters in the game by using Braille dot patterns on a touchscreen interface. Players can raise or lower dots to create Braille characters using taps and audio feedback from the phone. When a "raised" dot is touched on the screen, the phone vibrates. In VBGhost, a player can either play against the computer or against another person. We demonstrate the potential for the development of fun, accessible and educational games.

People who are blind or low vision may have a harder time participating in exercise classes due to inaccessibility, travel difficulties, or lack of experience. Exergames can encourage exercise at home and help lower the barrier to trying new activities, but there are often accessibility issues since they rely on visual feedback to help align body positions. To address this, we developed Eyes-Free Yoga, an exergame using the Microsoft Kinect that acts as a yoga instructor, teaches six yoga poses, and has customized auditory-only feedback based on skeletal tracking. We ran a controlled study with 16 people who are blind or low vision to evaluate the feasibility and feedback of Eyes-Free Yoga. We found participants enjoyed the game, and the extra auditory feedback helped their understanding of each pose. The findings of this work have implications for improving auditory-only feedback and on the design of exergames using depth cameras.

Eyes-free input usually relies on audio feedback that can be difficult to hear in noisy environments. We present DigiTaps, an eyes-free number entry method for touchscreen devices that requires little auditory attention. To enter a digit, users tap or swipe anywhere on the screen with one, two, or three fingers. The 10 digits are encoded by combinations of these gestures that relate to the digits' semantics. For example, the digit 2 is input with a 2-finger tap. We conducted a longitudinal evaluation with 16 people and found that DigiTaps with no audio feedback was faster but less accurate than with audio feedback after every input. Throughout the study, participants entered numbers with no audio feedback at an average rate of 0.87 characters per second, with an uncorrected error rate of 5.63%.