Blind and low-vision (BLV) people face many challenges when venturing into public environments, often wishing it were easier to get help from people nearby. Ironically, while many sighted individuals are willing to help, such interactions are infrequent. Asking for help is socially awkward for BLV people, and sighted people lack experience in helping BLV people. Through a mixed-ability research-through-design process, we explore four diverse approaches toward how assistive technology can serve as help supporters that collaborate with both BLV and sighted parties throughout the help process. These approaches span two phases: the connection phase (finding someone to help) and the collaboration phase (facilitating help after finding someone). Our findings from a 20-participant mixed-ability study reveal how help supporters can best facilitate connection, which types of information they should present during both phases, and more. We discuss design implications for future approaches to support face-to-face help.

Desktop screen readers as a web navigation mechanism for BLV users are tedious and frozen in time, especially in the face of richer ways of presenting spatial information such as tactile and touchscreen devices. In our work, we consider what it means to create and evaluate systems that can present a similarly rich, spatial interaction mechanism plugged into existing screen reader paradigms. We present a formative study conducted with SpaceNav, a custom screen reader that utilizes spatial input and output to navigate two different web applications. We present results from this study, and discuss a new browser extension we are implementing based on our formative study feedback to more robustly test spatial interactions in the context of real world websites. To close, we describe our goals for evaluating the new web extension in a future study.