Technology-mediated scams are a pervasive and enduring form of digital harm affecting older adults. While prior research has largely emphasized prevention, awareness, and risk perception, comparatively little attention has been paid to what follows after a scam occurs. Conceptualizing the scam as an unfolding event, we argue that each stage of the scam—before, during, and after—is shaped by distinct sociotechnical arrangements and relational dynamics that demand tailored forms of analysis and intervention. Through a multi-method study, we examine the during and after, paying specific attention to the post-scam, during which older adults navigate the affective, social, and material aftermath of scams. In doing so, we extend HCI’s engagement with digital harm by articulating the post-scam as a critical site of coordination, redress, and justice-seeking, offering new directions for research and intervention.

Blind people use visual assistance technologies (VAT) to access visual information, yet VAT can expose blind people to privacy risks.Prior HCI research has studied and built AI-enabled obfuscation techniques to detect and remove private content.However, blind people cannot easily spot errors in obfuscation tools.Our paper explores how assessment descriptors, brief visual attributes of objects, may enable blind people to find errors.By conducting interviews and focus groups with blind participants, we found that certain assessment descriptors (color, dimensions, distance) are inadequate to support blind people.Instead, participants discussed assessment descriptors that better reflect their sensemaking process, such as describing multiple objects in a particular space.Expanding the scope of accessible verification beyond assessment descriptors, participants called for greater transparency on how AI-enabled privacy techniques are developed and emphasized the need to co-create training materials on using AI-enabled privacy techniques.Building from our findings and disability studies scholarship, our paper examines how sighted bias could produce assessment descriptors that neglect the needs of blind people and analyzes how participants' preferred assessment descriptors contrast with existing standards of visual description.Lastly, we offer design directions to push for greater transparency in VAT and obfuscation tools.

Recent advancements in generative AI (GenAI) leveraging large language models (LLMs) have led to scholarship on how they (e.g., ChatGPT) can help neurodivergent students create customized workarounds and refocus energy.In response to calls for countering ableist narratives of lessening burdens and challenging normative norms that favor neurotypical individuals in prior research, we use interviews (n = 19) to center neurodivergent higher-education students' accounts related to the use, motivation, and vision for LLM-based GenAI tools in academia.While students found the tools helpful, their experiences revealed challenges with integration into tried-and-tested workflows, limited AI literacy support, experimentation, and flattening personality.Drawing on crip time, we illustrate how GenAI tools can reinforce the normative value of productivity, shifting the burden of access-making onto students themselves.We propose three design values, flexibility, adaptability, and self-authenticity, to reimagine GenAI as a partner rather than a tool prioritizing speed and self-sufficiency.

Peer Reviewed

In our contemporary moment, there exists a hegemonic design practice and a general social desire to retain information. With the help of sociotechnical platforms and other contemporary technologies, information has changed its temporal and spatial boundaries, creating unbounded, algorithmic, and emergent forms of retention. The consequences of such retention are numerous, ranging from an overabundance of autobiographical information that cannot be fully understood by the individual to the improper use and economization of such information by state and corporation alike. Within this context, this paper investigates a counter-hegemonic practice of forgetting, specifically from the perspective of human-computer interaction and computer-supported cooperative work research, with additional insight drawn from adjacent fields. In doing so, we present forgetting as a significant area of research with HCI and CSCW, a burgeoning and contradictory space that may offer solutions to issues we face within a moment of persistence by default. This paper also explores potential directions for future research and design on forgetting in HCI and CSCW through an investigation of an art piece by Chinese artist Song Dong.

Blind people use artificial intelligence-enabled visual assistance technologies (AI VAT) to gain visual access in their everyday lives, but these technologies are embedded with errors that may be difficult to verify non-visually. Previous studies have primarily explored sighted users’ understanding of AI output and created vision-dependent explainable AI (XAI) features. We extend this body of literature by conducting an in-depth qualitative study with 26 blind people to understand their verification experiences and preferences. We begin by describing errors blind people encounter, highlighting how AI VAT fails to support complex document layouts, diverse languages, and cultural artifacts. We then illuminate how blind people make sense of AI through experimenting with AI VAT, employing non-visual skills, strategically including sighted people, and cross-referencing with other devices. Participants provided detailed opportunities for designing accessible XAI, such as affordances to support contestation. Informed by disability studies framework of misfitting and fitting, we unpacked harmful assumptions with AI VAT, underscoring the importance of celebrating disabled ways of knowing. Lastly, we offer practical takeaways for Responsible AI practice to push the field of accessible XAI forward.

Effective communication between older adult care recipients and unpaid caregivers is essential to both care partners’ well-being. To understand communication in care relationships, we conducted a two-part study with older adult care recipients and caregivers. First, we conducted a two-week diary study to gain insight into care-related communication challenges. While caregivers discussed the benefits of emotional attachment, care recipients expressed concerns about emotional fluctuation and losing autonomy. These findings, along with literature on self-disclosure and conversational scaffolding informed our design of CareJournal—a voice-based conversational agent that supports care-related disclosure between care partners. We evaluated CareJournal with 40 care partners to inform future design considerations and learn more about their communication practices. Our findings highlight the impact of distance and tensions between care and independence, providing insight into how care partners imagine computer-mediated care communication impacting their relationships.

Abstract Evaluating information quality online is increasingly important for healthy decision‐making. People assess information quality using visual interfaces (e.g., computers, smartphones) with visual cues like aesthetics. Yet, voice interfaces lack critical visual cues for evaluating information because there is often no visual display. Without ways to assess voice‐based information quality, people may overly trust or misinterpret information which can be challenging in high‐risk or sensitive contexts. This paper investigates voice information uncertainty in one high‐risk context—health information seeking. We recruited 30 adults (ages 18–84) in the United States to participate in scenario‐based interviews about health topics. Our findings provide evidence of information uncertainty expectations with voice assistants, voice search preferences, and the audio cues they use to assess information quality. We contribute a nuanced discussion of how to inform more critical information ecosystems with voice technologies and propose ways to design audio cues to help people more quickly assess content quality.

Memory artifacts are personal and collective belongings that elicit deliberate or involuntary memories. They are significant as objects of continuity, vessels for identity, and links to past relationships and history-for individuals, families, and communities. Drawing from in-depth interviews and cultural probe sessions with 16 individuals over 65, we consider how older adults curate and interact with their personal artifacts that embody and inform memory. Participants' hands-on experiences with memory artifacts uncover a heterogeneous set of personal curation practices and identify tensions that result from the competing goals of creating a legible narrative or legacy for themselves, their family, and their communities. The transition from physical to digital memory artifacts often perpetuates tension but can also create moments of reflection. These findings contribute a set of design considerations for supporting curation practices. This paper joins and expands upon CSCW scholarship regarding the importance of memory artifacts and the ongoing challenges of retaining individual memory and history over time, which, if managed effectively, can benefit and sustain family and community history at large.

A growing body of research has examined the privacy concerns and behaviors of older adults, often within specific contexts. It remains unclear to what extent older adults' privacy concerns and behaviors vary across contexts and whether old age is the primary factor influencing privacy vulnerabilities. To address this gap, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 43 older adults (aged 65 to 89) in the United States. Our interviews were grounded in five scenarios: account and device sharing, healthcare, online advertising, social networking, and cybercrime. Our cross-contextual analysis showed that cybercrime was a recurring and pressing concern across scenarios; privacy concerns and protective behaviors were rarely mentioned in the healthcare scenario. Across all scenarios, participants' threat models and strategies revolved around data collection rather than other stages in which privacy harms may occur; they employed various active strategies to safeguard their privacy while trusting service providers to protect their information. Our findings underscore the need to revisit the discussion around privacy vulnerability and aging. Vulnerability levels among our participants varied widely and were often influenced by factors beyond age, such as tech savviness and income. We discuss opportunities for privacy interventions, technologies, and education that promote positive aging and recognize diversity among older adults.

Visual online communities can present accessibility challenges to older adults or people with vision and motor disabilities. Motivated by this challenge, accessibility and HCI researchers have called for voice-based communities to support aging and disability. This paper extends prior work on voice community design and short-term use by providing empirical data on how people interact with voice communities over time and intentional instances of non-use. We conducted a one-year study with 43 blind and low vision older adults, of whom 21 used a voice-based community. We use vignettes to unpack five different voice community member roles - the obligatory poster, routine poster, cross-platform lurker, busy socialite, and visual expertise seeker - and discuss community interactions over time. Findings show how participation varied based on engagement in other communities and ways that participants sought interaction. We discuss (1) how to design voice communities for member roles and (2) the implications of synchronous and asynchronous voice community interaction in voice-only communities.

The privacy dimensions of accessibility technologies are often understudied and overlooked. Very little prior research has investigated the privacy concerns of disabled people, and much less has studied the barriers of privacy-preserving techniques. In order to address this gap and bridge between two separate communities (accessibility and privacy), our one-day workshop explores how researchers might design and build technologies that are both accessible and privacy-preserving.

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.

While past research has examined older adults’ voice assistant (VA) use, it is unclear whether VAs provide enough value to sustain use when compared to technologies such as smartphones. Research also suggests that barriers around structured command input may limit use. In order to investigate these gaps in adoption, we conducted interviews with ten older adults in a long-term care community who have adopted Alexa devices for at least one year. Participants learned to use Alexa through a training program that encouraged exploration. They used Alexa to complement their daily routines, improve their mood, engage in cognitively stimulating activities, and support socialization with others. We discuss our findings in the context of prior work, describe strategies to promote VA learning and adoption, and present design recommendations to support aging.

As new forms of data capture emerge to power new AI applications, questions abound about the ethical implications of these data collection practices. In this paper, we present clinicians' perspectives on the prospective benefits and harms of voice data collection during health consultations. Such data collection is being proposed as a means to power models to assist clinicians with medical data entry, administrative tasks, and consultation analysis. Yet, clinicians' attitudes and concerns are largely absent from the AI narratives surrounding these use cases, and the academic literature investigating them. Our qualitative interview study used the concept of an informed consent process as a type of design fiction, to support elicitation of clinicians' perspectives on voice data collection and use associated with a fictional, near-term AI assistant. Through reflexive thematic analysis of in-depth sessions with physicians, we distilled eight classes of potential risks that clinicians are concerned about, including workflow disruptions, self-censorship, and errors that could impact patient eligibility for services. We conclude with an in-depth discussion of these prospective risks, reflect on the use of the speculative processes that illuminated them, and reconsider evaluation criteria for AI-assisted clinical documentation technologies in light of our findings.

With the rising usage of mobile phones by people with mild dementia, and the documented barriers to technology use that exist for people with dementia, there is an open opportunity to study the specifics of mobile phone use by people with dementia. In this work we provide a first step towards filling this gap through an interview study with fourteen people with mild to moderate dementia. Our analysis yields insights into mobile phone use by people with mild to moderate dementia, challenges they experience with mobile phone use, and their ideas to address these challenges. Based on these findings, we discuss design opportunities to help achieve more accessible and supportive technology use for people with dementia. Our work opens up new opportunities for the design of systems focused on augmenting and enhancing the abilities of people with dementia.

Ridesharing services have become a popular mode of transportation that holds significant benefits for people with disabilities unable to operate conventional motor vehicles. Prior work shows how these services enable people with vision impairments to travel independently without the use of public transportation or walking. We conducted a study in which we observed 17 blind or visually impaired participants using the Uber ridesharing service to explore the social and accessibility dynamics they perceived during their experiences. This paper presents a case study of the process used for our research, reflecting on aspects that considerably impacted the study. Key takeaways include study site considerations, recruiting participants, balancing realism with participant safety, and the unintended side effects of observations in a ridesharing context. The reflection points provided will help readers in considering important study aspects when conducting observations with participants with disabilities, particularly in a ridesharing setting.

Blind and low vision people use visual description services (VDS) to gain visual interpretation and build access in a world that privileges sight. Despite their many benefits, VDS have many harmful privacy and security implications. As a result, researchers are suggesting, exploring, and building obfuscation systems that detect and obscure private or sensitive materials. However, as obfuscation depends largely on sight to interpret outcomes, it is unknown whether Blind and low vision people would find such approaches useful. Our work aims to center the perspectives and opinions of Blind and low vision people on the potential of obfuscation to address privacy concerns in VDS. By reporting on interviews with 20 Blind and low vision people who use VDS, our findings reveal that popular research trends in obfuscation fail to capture the needs of Blind and low vision people. While obfuscation might be helpful in gaining more control, tensions around obfuscation misrecognition and confirmation are prominent. We turn to the framework of interdependence to unpack and understand obfuscation in VDS, enabling us to complicate privacy concerns, uncover the labor of Blind and low vision people, and emphasize the importance of safeguards. We provide design directions to move the trajectory of obfuscation research forward.

Although voice assistants are increasingly being adopted by older adults, we lack empirical research on how they interact with these devices for health information seeking. Also, prior work shows how voice assistant responses can provide misleading or inaccurate information and be harmful particularly in health contexts. Because of increased health needs while aging, this paper studies older adult’s (ages 65+) health-related voice assistant interactions. Motivated by a lack of empirical evidence for how older adults approach information seeking with emerging technologies, we first conducted a survey of n = 201 older adults to understand how they engage voice assistants compared to a range of offline and digital sources for health information seeking. Findings show how voice assistants were used for confirmatory health queries, with users showing signs of distrust. As much prior work focuses on perceptions of voice assistant use, we conducted scenario-based interviews with n = 35 older adults to study health-related voice assistant behavior. In interviews, participants engaged with different health topics (flu, migraine, high blood pressure) and scenario types (symptom-driven, behavior-driven) using a voice assistant. Findings show how conversational and human-like expectations with voice assistants lead to information breakdowns between the older adult and voice assistant. This paper contributes a nuanced query-level analysis of older adults’ voice-based health information seeking behaviors. Further, data provide evidence for how query reformulation happens with complex topics in voice-based information seeking. We use our findings to discuss how voice interfaces can better support older adults’ health information seeking behaviors and expectations.

Older adults can experience significant changes to their social networks as they age, triggering changes in their social connection practices. In this paper, we extend research on older adults’ connectedness behaviors using a multimodal connectedness framing—that is, how they engage with others across platforms, devices, and modalities. Using the COVID-19 pandemic as a case study, we investigate how older adults navigate a major change or infrastructural breakdown in their social routines. We conducted a survey with 146 U.S.-based older adults (65+), and follow-up interviews with a subset of 23 survey respondents. Findings revealed the resilience and innovation with which older adults adapted their behaviors across multiple modalities to maintain social relationships and playfully connect with others in person and online. Using these findings, we propose that research on designing for aging extend beyond designing for connection in the smart home; we argue for a design agenda that prioritizes designing for smart relationships with the potential to persist across spaces via multimodal connectedness.

A diverse representation of different demographic groups in AI training data sets is important in ensuring that the models will work for a large range of users. To this end, recent efforts in AI fairness and inclusion have advocated for creating AI data sets that are well-balanced across race, gender, socioeconomic status, and disability status. In this paper, we contribute to this line of work by focusing on the representation of age by asking whether older adults are represented proportionally to the population at large in AI data sets. We examine publicly-available information about 92 face data sets to understand how they codify age as a case study to investigate how the subjects' ages are recorded and whether older generations are represented. We find that older adults are very under-represented; five data sets in the study that explicitly documented the closed age intervals of their subjects included older adults (defined as older than 65 years), while only one included oldest-old adults (defined as older than 85 years). Additionally, we find that only 24 of the data sets include any age-related information in their documentation or metadata, and that there is no consistent method followed across these data sets to collect and record the subjects' ages. We recognize the unique difficulties in creating representative data sets in terms of age, but raise it as an important dimension that researchers and engineers interested in inclusive AI should consider.

Older adults are often portrayed as passive social media users who consume content rather than actively posting content. However, this binary divide between active and passive social media use overlooks nuanced kinds of engagement online. Via an eye-tracking study of older adults' Facebook use, this work shows how not clicking or commenting on content can involve engaged kinds of social media use even if they are not visible to other users or to the platform. Older adults' decisions to not actively click or comment on social media content---an act which is often associated with non-engagement---can be intentional and relational acts of caregiving. We draw from feminist care theories to draw parallels between the invisibility of care work that older adults do on social media and the invisibility often rendered in their offline lives. We discuss theoretical, methodological, and design implications for supporting older adults as engaged participants in relational and intentional care work.

Negative attitudes shape experiences with stigmatized conditions such as dementia, from affecting social relationships to influencing willingness to adopt technology. Consequently, attitudinal change has been identified as one lever to improve life for people with stigmatized conditions. Though recognized as a scaleable approach, social media has not been studied in terms of how it should best be designed or deployed to target attitudes and understanding of dementia. Through a mixed methods design with 123 undergraduate college students, we study the effect of being exposed to dementia-related media, including content produced by people with dementia. We selected undergraduate college students as the target of our intervention, as they represent the next generation that will work and interact with individuals with dementia. Our analysis describes changes over the period of two weeks in attitudes and understanding of the condition. The shifts in understanding of dementia that we found in our qualitative analysis were not captured by the instrument we selected to assess understanding of dementia. While small improvements in positive and overall attitudes were seen across all interventions and the control, we observe a different pattern with negative attitudes, where transcriptions of content produced by people with dementia significantly reduced negative attitudes. The discussion presents implications for supporting people with dementia as content producers, doing so in ways that best affect attitudes and understanding by drawing on research on cues and interactive media, and supporting students in changing their perspectives towards people with dementia.

Relatively few studies of accessibility and transportation for people with vision impairments have investigated forms of transportation besides public transportation and walking. To develop a more nuanced understanding of this context, we turn to ridesharing, an increasingly used mode of transportation. We interviewed 16 visually-impaired individuals about their active use of ridesharing services like Uber and Lyft. Our findings show that, while people with vision impairments value independence, ridesharing involves building trust across a complex network of stakeholders and technologies. This data is used to start a discussion on how other systems can facilitate trust for people with vision impairments by considering the role of conversation, affordances of system incentives, and increased agency.

Ridesharing services like Uber and Lyft play an important role in broadening access to affordable, efficient transportation for people with vision impairments by providing an alternative to public transit, friends, or family. While previous work has focused on the challenges that people with disabilities experience using public transportation and how they interact with ridesharing drivers, little research has focused on the people in the "front seat" and how drivers support people with vision impairments during rides. To better understand these interactions, we interviewed 18 ridesharing drivers who had experience driving passengers with a disability, specifically people with vision impairments. Our findings show that ridesharing drivers engage in different forms of labor (i.e. physical, relational) to support passengers with disabilities and are seeking ways to learn more about disability. Contrary to most previous literature on ridesharing and the sharing economy, we find that drivers do not see this labor as a burden. We discuss ethical and design considerations for the complex process of disability disclosure, wherein passengers might benefit from having drivers know in advance about their disability, but also open themselves up to possible exploitation by drivers.

Autonomy and control are important themes in design for people with disabilities. With the rise in research in autonomous vehicle design, we investigate perceived differences in control for people with vision impairments in the use of semi- and fully autonomous vehicles. We conducted focus groups with 15 people with vision impairments. Each focus group included a design component asking participants to design voice-based and tactile solutions to problems identified by the group. We contribute a new perspective of independence in the context of control. We discuss the importance of driving for blind and low vision people, describe differences in perceptions of autonomous vehicles based on level of autonomy, and the use of assistive technology in vehicle operation and information gathering. Our findings guide the design of accessible autonomous transportation systems and existing navigation and orientation systems for people with vision impairments.

Ride-hailing services have received attention as part of the growing work around the sharing economy, but the focus of these studies has largely been on drivers. In this paper, we examine how ride-hailing is transforming the transportation practices of one group of passengers - people with visual impairments in metropolitan India. Through a qualitative study consisting of interviews and observations, we examined the use and impact of these services on our target population, who otherwise contend with chaotic, unreliable, and largely inaccessible modes of transportation. We found that ride-hailing services positively affects participants' notions of independence, and we tease out how independence for our participants is not just about 'doing things alone, without help' but is also situated, social and relative. Furthermore, we show how accessibility, in the case of ride-hailing in India, is a socio-technical and collaborative achievement, involving interactions between the passenger, the driver, and the technology.

Mainstream crowdwork platforms treat microtasks as indivisible units; however, in this article, we propose that there is value in re-examining this assumption. We argue that crowdwork platforms can improve their value proposition for all stakeholders by supporting subcontracting within microtasks. After describing the value proposition of subcontracting, we then define three models for microtask subcontracting: real-time assistance, task management, and task improvement, and reflect on potential use cases and implementation considerations associated with each. Finally, we describe the outcome of two tasks on Mechanical Turk meant to simulate aspects of subcontracting. We reflect on the implications of these findings for the design of future crowd work platforms that effectively harness the potential of subcontracting workflows.

"Remind me to get milk later this afternoon." In communications and planning, people often express uncertainty about time using imprecise temporal expressions (ITEs). Unfortunately, modern virtual assistants often lack system support to capture the intents behind these expressions. This can result in unnatural interactions and undesirable interruptions (e.g., having a work reminder delivered at 12pm when out at lunch, because the user said "this afternoon"). In this paper we explore existing practices, expectations, and preferences surrounding the use of ITEs. Our mixed methods approach employs surveys, interviews, and an analysis of a large corpus of written communications. We find that people frequently use a diverse set of ITEs in both communication and planning. These uses reflect a variety of motivations, such as conveying uncertainty or task priority. In addition, we find that people have a variety of expectations about time input and management when interacting with virtual assistants. We conclude with design implications for future virtual assistants.

Ageism is a pervasive, and often invisible, form of discrimination. Though it can affect people of all ages, older adults in particular face age-related stereotypes and bias in their everyday lives. In this paper, we describe the ways in which older bloggers articulate a collective narrative on ageism as it appears in their lives, develop a community with anti-ageist interests, and discuss strategies to navigate and change societal views and institutions. Bloggers criticize stereotypical notions that focus exclusively on losses that occur with age and advocate a view that takes into account the complexity and positive aspects of older adulthood. This paper contributes a unique case of online collective action among older adults while drawing on their online discourse as a way of understanding what ageism means for CSCW.

Although many older adults are active online, certain age-related disabilities, such as late-life vision impairment, make sustaining online participation difficult. Motivated by the need for accessible online spaces for people experiencing vision impairment in older adulthood, we developed xPress, a voice-based online blogging community. Through a 10-week deployment with seven older adults with acquired vision loss, we analyze how this type of online community enables connecting with peers, sharing experiences, and offering social support in new ways. The design of xPress also highlights the importance of human voice in accessible social platforms and reveals expectations around community participation. We discuss designing for age and disability through the lens of intersectionality and offer design considerations for similar voice-based online communities.

Older adults and people with vision impairments are increasingly using phones to receive audio-based information and want to publish content online but must use complex audio recording/editing tools that often rely on inaccessible graphical interfaces. This poster describes the design of an accessible audio-based interface for post-processing audio content created by visually impaired seniors. We conducted a diary study with five older adults with vision impairments to understand how to design a system that would allow them to edit content they record using an audio-only interface. Our findings can help inform the development of accessible audio-editing interfaces for people with vision impairments more broadly.

Diversifying participation in crowd work can benefit the worker and requester. Increasing numbers of older adults are online, but little is known about their awareness of or how they engage in mainstream crowd work. Through an online survey with 505 seniors, we found that most have never heard of crowd work but would be motivated to complete tasks by earning money or working on interesting or stimulating tasks. We follow up results from the survey with interviews and observations of 14 older adults completing crowd work tasks. While our survey data suggests that financial incentives are encouraging, in-depth interviews reveal that a combination of personal and social incentives may be stronger drivers of participation, but only if older adults can overcome accessibility issues and understand the purpose of crowd work. This paper contributes insights into how crowdsourcing sites could better engage seniors and other users.

While the majority of older adults are now active online, they are often perceived as passive consumers of online information rather than active creators of content. As a counter to this view, we examine the practices of older adult bloggers (N=20) through in-depth interviews. We study this group of older adults as a unique case of content creation and sharing. We find that the practice of creating and sharing through blogging meets several important psychological and social needs for older adults. Specifically, blogging supports the development of identity in older adulthood; fosters self-expression that supports older adults' values; provides meaningful engagement during retirement; and enables a sense of community and social interaction that is important for wellbeing in late-life. We argue for a focus on designing for late-life development and detail opportunities for online systems to better support the dynamic experience of growing older through online content creation and sharing.

Older adults are most often considered consumers of online information, but recent work highlights the importance of engaging older adults in content generation and online sharing. One context in which older adults generate and share content is art therapy for individuals with dementia. Our analysis draws on Altman's notion of privacy and territorial regions to understand what sharing means for this vulnerable population. This theoretical framing reveals the ways in which privacy is cooperatively negotiated, which is in contrast to the individualistic view of existing sharing systems; how older adults derive benefits from sharing depending on interaction with their audience; and how sharing fluctuates between a focus on the process of therapy versus the product depending on privacy needs. Our analysis contributes an understanding of the complex nature of sharing for vulnerable populations and offers design considerations for systems that support this practice.

In this paper, we describe the challenges we encountered and solutions we developed while collecting mobile touch and gesture interaction data in laboratory conditions from children ages 5 to 7 years old. We identify several challenges of conducting empirical studies with young children, including study length, motivation, and environment. We then propose and validate techniques for designing study protocols for this age group, focusing on the use of gamification components to better engage children in laboratory studies. The use of gamification increased our study task completion rates from 73% to 97%. This research contributes a better understanding of how to design study protocols for young children when lab studies are needed or preferred. Research with younger age groups alongside older children, adults, and special populations can lead to more sound guidelines for universal usability of mobile applications.

Face-to-face design with child and adult design partners is not always possible due to distant geographical locations or time differences. Yet we believe that the designs of children in areas not co-located with system builders, or who live in locations not easily accessed, are just as important and valid as children who are easily accessible especially when designing for a multinational audience. This paper reports on the prototype design process of DisCo, a computer-based design tool that enables intergenerational co-designers to collaborate online and asynchronously while being geographically distributed. DisCo contains tools that enable the designers to iterate, annotate, and communicate from within the tool. This tool was used to facilitate distributed co-design. We learned that children were less forgiving of their inability to draw on the computer than on paper, and they formed small, intergenerational design teams at their own locations when the technology did not work as they expected.

Fashion is a language. How we dress signals to others who we are and how we want to be perceived. However, this language is primarily visual, making it inaccessible to people with vision impairments. Someone who is low-vision or completely blind cannot see what others are wearing or readily know what constitutes the norms and extremes of fashion, but most everyone they encounter can see (and judge) their fashion choices. We describe our findings of a diary study with people with vision impairments that revealed the many accessibility barriers fashion presents, and how an online survey revealed that clothing decisions are often made collaboratively, regardless of visual ability. Based on these findings, we identified a need for a collaborative and real-time environment for fashion advice. We have tested the feasibility of providing this advice through crowdsourcing using VizWiz, a mobile phone application where participants receive nearly real-time answers to visual questions. Our pilot study results show that this application has the potential to address a great need within the blind community, but remaining challenges include improving photo capture and assembling a set of crowd workers with the requisite expertise. More broadly our research highlights the feasibility of using crowdsourcing for subjective, opinion-based advice.

Abstract This paper presents the results of a large‐scale, qualitative study conducted in the homes of children aged 7, 9, and 11 investigating internet searching processes on Google. Seven search roles, representing distinct behavior patterns displayed by children when interacting with the Google search engine, are described, including Developing Searchers, Domain‐specific Searchers, Power Searchers, Nonmotivated Searchers, Distracted Searchers, Rule‐bound Searchers, and Visual Searchers. Other trends are described and selected to present a view of the whole child searcher. These roles and trends are used to make recommendations to designers, researchers, educators, and parents about the directions to take when considering how to best aid children to become search literate.

We introduce a design technique, Clear Panels, to design interactive mobile device applications. Using mixed-fidelity prototyping, a combination of low- and high-tech materials, participants refine multiple aspects of a mobile application's design. Clear Panels supports writing and sketching via a transparent overlay affixed atop a mobile device screen. It enables design partners to refine their gesture-based interactions on actual devices. The technique has been successfully implemented in the design of children's mobile applications. The technique leverages and extends longstanding interaction design methods to include mobile and hand-held technologies. Importantly, we show it is effective in raising participants' awareness of key mobile application design issues without constraining their creativity.