The meaning of “homes” is complicated for disabled people because of the historical link between (de)institutionalization, housing, and civil rights. But, it is unclear whether and how this history impacts Accessible Computing (AC) research in domestic spaces. We performed Critical Discourse Analysis on 101 AC articles to explore how (de)institutionalization affects domestic AC research. We found (de)institutionalization motivates goals of “independence” for disabled people. Yet, discourses of housing reflected institutional logics which are in tension with “independence”—complicating how goals were set, housing was understood, and design was approached. We outline three discourses of housing in AC and identify parallels to those used to justify institutionalization in the USA. We reflect upon their consequences for AC research. We offer principles derived from the Independent Living Movement as frameworks for challenging institutional conceptions of housing, to open new avenues for more holistic and anti-ableist domestic AC research.

Many efforts to increase accessibility in coding for developers with visual impairments (DWVI) focus on supporting interactions with development tools. But, to understand how to appropriately modify and write source code, developers must seek information from a variety of disparate and highly technical sources. DWVI might benefit from technological support in this process. But, it is unclear what accessibility issues arise in technical information sources, whether accessibility impacts strategies for seeking technical information, or how best to support DWVI in information seeking. We conducted observations and interviews with twelve DWVI, to explore their information behaviors. We found that DWVI seek information in many of the same sources as their sighted peers, and accessibility issues in technical information sources were similar to those in nontechnical sources. But, despite these similarities, examining development as an information seeking process highlighted the role of contextual and social factors in determining accessibility for DWVI.

A growing body of evidence suggests Voice Assistants (VAs) are highly valued by people with vision impairments (PWVI) and much less so by sighted users. Yet, many are deployed in homes where both PWVI and sighted family members reside. Researchers have yet to study whether VA use and perceived benefits are affected in settings where one person has a visual impairment and others do not. We conducted six in-depth interviews with partners to understand patterns of domestic VA use in mixed-visual-ability families. Although PWVI were more motivated to acquire VAs, used them more frequently, and learned more proactively about their features, partners with vision identified similar benefits and disadvantages of having VAs in their home. We found that the universal usability of VAs both equalizes experience across abilities and presents complex tradeoffs for families-regarding interpersonal relationships, domestic labor, and physical safety-which are weighed against accessibility benefits for PWVI and complicate the decision to fully integrate VAs in the home.

Co-reading (when parents read aloud with their children) is an important literacy development activity for children. HCI has begun to explore how technology might support children in co-reading, but little empirical work examines how parents currently co-read, and no work examines how people with visual impairments (PWVI) co-read. PWVIs' perspectives offer unique insights into co-reading, as PWVI often read differently from their children, and (Braille) literacy holds particular cultural significance for PWVI. We observed discussions of co-reading practices in a blind parenting forum on Facebook, to establish a grounded understanding of how and why PWVI co-read. We found that PWVIs' co-reading practices were highly diverse and affected by a variety of socio-technical concerns - and visual ability was less influential than other factors like ability to read Braille, presence of social supports, and children's literacy. Our findings show that PWVI have valuable insights into co-reading, which could help technologies in this space better meet the needs of parents and children, with and without disabilities.

Workplace environments are characterized by frequent interruptions that can lead to stress. However, measures of stress due to interruptions are typically obtained through self-reports, which can be affected by memory and emotional biases. In this paper, we use a thermal imaging system to obtain objective measures of stress and investigate personality differences in contexts of high and low interruptions. Since a major source of workplace interruptions is email, we studied 63 participants while multitasking in a controlled office environment with two different email contexts: managing email in batch mode or with frequent interruptions. We discovered that people who score high in Neuroticism are significantly more stressed in batching environments than those low in Neuroticism. People who are more stressed finish emails faster. Last, using Linguistic Inquiry Word Count on the email text, we find that higher stressed people in multitasking environments use more anger in their emails. These findings help to disambiguate prior conflicting results on email batching and stress.

Chronic disease is one of the most pressing health challenges facing the United States (and an increasing set of other countries). The onset or progression of diseases like obesity, diabetes, and metabolic disorder are strongly related to eating behavior, and scientists are still trying to fully understand the complex mixture of diet, exercise, genetics, sociocultural context, and physical environment that lead to these diseases. Health science, however, has no effective means for automatically measuring eating behavior in free-living conditions. The Auracle aims to be a wearable earpiece that detects eating behavior, to be fielded by health-science researchers in their efforts to study eating behavior and ultimately to develop interventions useful to individuals striving to address chronic disease related to eating.

Tiny intermittently powered computers can monitor objects in hard to reach places maintenance free for decades by leaving batteries behind and surviving off energy harvested from the environment--- avoiding the cost of replacing and disposing of billions or trillions of dead batteries. However, creating programs for these sensors is difficult. Energy harvesting is inconsistent, energy storage is scarce, and batteryless sensors can lose power at any point in time--- causing volatile memory, execution progress, and time to reset. In response to these disruptions, developers must write unwieldy programs attempting to protect against failures, instead of focusing on sensing goals, defining tasks, and generating useful data in a timely manner. To address these shortcomings, we have designed Mayfly, a language and runtime for timely execution of sensing tasks on tiny, intermittently-powered, energy harvesting sensing devices. Mayfly is a coordination language and runtime built on top of Embedded-C that combines intermittent execution fragments to form coherent sensing schedules---maintaining forward progress, data consistency, data freshness, and data utility across multiple power failures. Mayfly makes the passing of time explicit, binding data to the time it was gathered, and keeping track of data and time through power failures. We evaluated Mayfly against state-of-the art systems, conducted a user study, and implemented multiple real world applications across application domains in inventory tracking, and wearables.

Wearable technology enables a range of exciting new applications in health, commerce, and beyond. For many important applications, wearables must have battery life measured in weeks or months, not hours and days as in most current devices. Our vision of wearable platforms aims for long battery life but with the flexibility and security to support multiple applications. To achieve long battery life with a workload comprising apps from multiple developers, these platforms must have robust mechanisms for app isolation and developer tools for optimizing resource usage.

In this demonstration we present the Amulet Platform; a hardware and software platform for developing energy- and resource-efficient applications on multi-application wearable devices. This platform, which includes the Amulet Firmware Toolchain, the Amulet Runtime, the ARP-View graphical tool, and open reference hardware, efficiently protects applications from each other without MMU support, allows developers to interactively explore how their implementation decisions impact battery life without the need for hardware modeling and additional software development, and represents a new approach to developing long-lived wearable applications. We envision the Amulet Platform enabling long-duration experiments on human subjects in a wide variety of studies.