AI-assisted usability analysis can potentially reduce the time and effort of finding usability problems, yet little is known about how AI's perceived expertise influences evaluators' analytic strategies and perceptions over time. We ran a within-subjects, five-session study (six hours per participant) with 12 professional UX evaluators who worked with two conversational assistants designed to appear novice- or expert-like (differing in suggestion quantity and response accuracy). We logged behavioral measures (number of passes, suggestion acceptance rate), collected subjective ratings (trust, perceived efficiency), and conducted semi-structured interviews. Participants experienced an initial novelty effect and a subsequent dip in trust that recovered over time. Their efficiency improved as they shifted from a two-pass to a one-pass video inspection approach. Evaluators ultimately rated the experienced CA as significantly more efficient, trustworthy, and comprehensive, despite not perceiving expertise differences early on. We conclude with design implications for adapting AI expertise to enable calibrated human-AI collaboration.

Accessibility is often only introduced later in computing students' coursework in the classes that focus on creating user interfaces. However, there are various approaches to introduce accessibility earlier in the curriculum. We present a data-driven approach that uses data about accessibility or disability as the context for computing problems such as database searching and inheritance modeling. These examples illustrate for educators how they can include accessibility in a wide range of courses.

Cultural background influences aesthetic web design preferences, and aesthetic design impacts accessible design. However, limited research has focused on this intersection of cultural background and accessible web design. With the majority of HCI and design resources originating from the Global North, we investigated the conflicts experienced due to the cultural background of digital designers from the Global South and current web accessibility guidelines. We conducted a design activity and interview study with 10 designers from five countries in the Global South to identify how current web accessibility guidelines conflict with our participants’ cultural design preferences. We found there are specific cultural challenges encountered in accessible web design, both at the design level (e.g., typography and color scheme) and within broader societal contexts (e.g., designer-client interactions). Our paper also offers suggestions from our participants to make the accessible design process more culturally inclusive by improving the web accessibility resources to become culturally customized and engaging more cultural perspectives in accessibility research and education.

There are many disabilities that affect a person's ability to speak. As such, alternatives to verbal communication are often sought. These alternatives are referred to as Augmented and Alternative Communication Systems (AACs). An AAC can be either high-tech or low/no-tech. While many AACs require a user to type out what they want spoken, there are also AACs that rely on symbols for communication. We introduced these topics to students using an assignment that asks students to create the backend for a symbol based AAC device. The device will have a symbol board where there is a page with categories (e.g. food, clothing), which when selected goes to another page with the different items. When an image is selected within the category, the relevant text is spoken aloud. The students are asked to write the relevant methods for the AAC such as determining what images to load and what is spoken aloud. This assignment was used in a data structures course to give students experience working with maps. This assignment is focused for students who are working in Java and comfortable with an object-oriented approach. The real-world context of using devices that are commonly used by people with disabilities that affect their speech was interesting to students. The assignment served as an introduction to certain disabilities and showed students the real-world use of technology to help people communicate.

Web accessibility is essential for ensuring that all individuals, regardless of their physical or cognitive abilities, can access and effectively use the internet. This principle is fundamental as digital platforms increasingly become primary channels for education, communication, commerce, and entertainment. Our study critically evaluates the effectiveness of accessibility overlays, which are third-party tools that claim to enhance website usability for people with disabilities. Specifically, we focused on the experiences of blind and low-vision users, who are disproportionately impacted by poor web accessibility. Through a combination of online surveys and interviews, we engaged with participants who employ a variety of assistive technologies to navigate the web. The empirical evidence gathered paints a troubling picture: despite their intended purpose, accessibility overlays often fail to deliver on their promises and, in many cases, increase existing challenges. Participants frequently reported that these overlays conflicted with their assistive technologies, leading to reduced functionality and increased frustration. This points to a significant misalignment between the design of these tools and the real-world needs of users. The study highlights the pressing need to move away from superficial technological fixes and towards deeper, more meaningful engagement with the needs of disabled users. This involves embracing user-centered design practices that integrate accessibility considerations from the ground up, ensuring that digital environments are truly inclusive. By prioritizing comprehensive, well-integrated solutions over patches like overlays, we can foster a more accessible and equitable digital landscape.

Incorporating accessibility education into undergraduate computer science (CS) programs is essential for preparing future technology professionals to create inclusive technology. However, many CS programs lack accessibility coverage, often confining it to human-computer interaction (HCI) courses. To address this gap, we developed accessibility assignments seamlessly integrated into core CS courses. We collaborated closely with ten instructors to select and customize these assignments to suit their needs. To evaluate the impact of these assignments, we conducted interviews with instructors and administered surveys and interviews with their students. Our findings indicate significant improvement in students' familiarity with accessibility concepts and confidence in implementation following completion of the assignments. However, their mindset and future interest in accessibility remained the same. Instructors found it straightforward to incorporate these assignments without compromising core computing concepts. In sum, we validated a foundation for effectively resourcing instructors with accessibility teaching materials and increasing their capacity in accessibility knowledge.

Usability testing is vital for enhancing the user experience (UX) of interactive systems. However, analyzing test videos is complex and resource-intensive. Recent AI advancements have spurred exploration into human-AI collaboration for UX analysis, particularly through natural language. Unlike user-initiated dialogue, our study investigated the potential of proactive conversational assistants to aid UX evaluators through automatic suggestions at three distinct times: before, in sync with, and after potential usability problems. We conducted a hybrid Wizard-of-Oz study involving 24 UX evaluators, using ChatGPT to generate automatic problem suggestions and a human actor to respond to impromptu questions. While timing did not significantly impact analytic performance, suggestions appearing after potential problems were preferred, enhancing trust and efficiency. Participants found the automatic suggestions useful, but they collectively identified more than twice as many problems, underscoring the irreplaceable role of human expertise. Our findings also offer insights into future human-AI collaborative tools for UX evaluation.

Our AI-focused traineeships for graduate students integrate research and education components to contribute to diversifying the AI research workforce. We describe the program and introduce multiple strategies to achieve interdisciplinarity, diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility. Early evaluation results are included.

Accessibility, the means by which a person with a disability can equitably access, engage with, and use digital technology, is an important topic for tech professions to know, but it is not commonly included in computing curricula. Prior research has shown that professional development opportunities are needed as few instructors are currently including accessibility into their courses and more instructors do not feel they have adequate training to include the information. The lack of accessibility skills in graduates is a current issue for the tech industry, which is facing a skills gap as laws and regulations place an increasing need for the skills. This workshop seeks to close that skills gap by having three instructors with extensive experience in accessibility and integrating it into their classroom partner with Teach Access, a non-profit organization with strong ties to the tech industry that focuses on bridging the accessibility skills gap across academia and industry, to share their experiences and guide instructors through making changes to their own courses. The workshop will first provide instructors with a background about accessibility. Next, we will cover examples of how to integrate accessibility into courses. Finally, instructors will work in small groups based on the courses they are teaching to develop modifications to their own courses.

Few instructors include accessibility in computing education curriculum despite its importance in the computing field. Prior work on accessibility and CS education vary on what accessibility knowledge is appropriate for future computing professionals and is covered mainly in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and web design courses. In practice, there is no comprehensive list of learning objectives to characterize Accessibility as a competency even though it is an increasingly desired skillset across computing broadly. Moreover, in the soon-to-be-released CS2023, the Accessibility Knowledge Unit is nested within HCI. This placement fails to highlight the role accessibility plays throughout the CS curriculum, nor does it provide sufficient structure to guide CS educators. Thus, these efforts may not be enough to prepare future tech professionals with adequate accessibility skills to meet growing industry demand. We argue that Accessibility should be its own Knowledge Area within the CS curriculum. We present a set of knowledge units with topics and illustrative learning objectives for an Accessibility Knowledge Area in Computing Education. These objectives were produced through synthesizing computing education and accessible computing literature and discussions among the authors, who are subject matter experts in both computing education and accessibility. In this position paper, we make the case that Accessibility should be incorporated into computer science across the curriculum beyond just HCI, and we demonstrate how the knowledge units spans the different facets of computing. In addition to highlighting the cross-curriculum importance of Accessibility, the presented Knowledge Area outline provides structure for future work in creating teaching resources and guiding curricular integration.

AI is promising in assisting UX evaluators with analyzing usability tests, but its judgments are typically presented as non-interactive visualizations. Evaluators may have questions about test recordings, but have no way of asking them. Interactive conversational assistants provide a Q&A dynamic that may improve analysis efficiency and evaluator autonomy. To understand the full range of analysis-related questions, we conducted a Wizard-of-Oz design probe study with 20 participants who interacted with simulated AI assistants via text or voice. We found that participants asked for five categories of information: user actions, user mental model, help from the AI assistant, product and task information, and user demographics. Those who used the text assistant asked more questions, but the question lengths were similar. The text assistant was perceived as significantly more efficient, but both were rated equally in satisfaction and trust. We also provide design considerations for future conversational AI assistants for UX evaluation.

Visual arts play an important role in cultural life and provide access to social heritage and self-enrichment, but most visual arts are inaccessible to blind people. Researchers have explored different ways to enhance blind people’s access to visual arts (e.g., audio descriptions, tactile graphics). However, how blind people adopt these methods remains unknown. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 15 blind visual arts patrons to understand how they engage with visual artwork and the factors that influence their adoption of visual arts access methods. We further examined interview insights in a follow-up survey (N=220). We present: 1) current practices and challenges of accessing visual artwork in-person and online (e.g., Zoom tour), 2) motivation and cognition of perceiving visual arts (e.g., imagination), and 3) implications for designing visual arts access methods. Overall, our findings provide a roadmap for technology-based support for blind people’s visual arts experiences.

Teaching accessibility is essential in training technologists and designers. However, the topics of accessibility and disability are vast and intersect with culture (social constructions). Since cultural background is an influential factor in design decisions, which could have implications for accessible design, we wanted to understand whether and how courses at U.S. institutions address the importance of cultural influences when teaching accessibility and disability topics. We surveyed 72 students from U.S. institutions and ran 14 follow-up interviews with students who took technical and non-technical courses. Using reflexive thematic analysis, we found similarities and differences in how technical and non-technical courses approach accessibility teaching. We found a lack of cultural focus in accessibility teaching in the technical courses, which can be improved by adopting teaching approaches from non-technical courses. We also make recommendations to improve course design, such as including people from different cultures and disabilities to help develop courses.

Accessibility is an important skillset for computing graduates, however it is commonly not included in computing curriculums. The goal of this workshop is to bring together the relevant stakeholders who are interested in adding accessibility into the curriculum (e.g. computing educators, accessibility researchers, and industry professionals) to discuss what exactly we should be teaching regarding accessibility. The format of the workshop works to support two main goals, to provide a consensus on what should be taught by computing educators regarding accessibility and to provide those who have taught accessibility a chance to share and discuss what they have found to be successful. As a part of this workshop, we plan to draft a white paper that discusses the learning objectives and their relative priorities that were derived in the workshop.

Many digital systems are found to be inaccessible and a large part of the issue is that accessibility is not considered early enough in the design process. Digital prototyping tools are a powerful resource for designers to quickly explore both low and high fidelity design mockups during initial stages of product design and development. We evaluated 10 popular prototyping tools to understand their built-in and third-party accessibility features. We found that accessible design support is largely from third-party plug-ins rather than prototyping tools’ built-in features, and the availability of accessibility support varies from tool to tool. There is potential to improve accessible design by increasing the potential for accessibility to be consider earlier in the design process.

In the software industry, good design often translates into good user experiences. As accessibility is a key component of usable software, there are opportunities for software professionals to include accessibility in their skill set. However, despite a push to motivate more companies to include accessibility as a desired knowledge and skill set, little is known about how much companies are seeking to recruit employees with accessibility proficiency. In this paper, we investigated the extent to which companies seek software designer and developer skills in accessibility by analyzing software job posts on LinkedIn. Our results showed that the majority of job posts did not require any accessibility skills, and that educating developers and designers about accessibility was a required qualification for many of the accessibility-focused software jobs.

Digital accessibility has become an important topic in the field of HCI, but when looking at accessibility on a global scale, we find that the representation of accessibility research is mostly centered in the Global North with countries that are WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic). Our paper explores digital accessibility in Iran, focusing exclusively on its national policies on accessibility. Iran is a non-WEIRD country located in the Global South, with no reports on its digital accessibility status from the Global Initiative for Inclusive Information and Communication Technologies (G3ict). We found that there is not enough focus on accessibility in Iran’s regulations and we conclude our paper by recommending directions for improving this situation such as HCI and disability organizations in Iran cooperating with G3ict.

Website builders enable individuals without design or technical skills to create websites. However, it is unclear if modern websites created by website builders meet accessibility standards. We reviewed six popular website building platforms and found a lack of accessibility support. Wix provided the most comprehensive accessibility documentation and robust accessibility features. However, during an accessibility audit of 90 Wix webpages, we found many accessibility issues, raising concerns about how users are supported.

Makeup and cosmetics offer the potential for self-expression and the reshaping of social roles for visually impaired people. However, there exist barriers to conducting a beauty regime because of the reliance on visual information and color variances in makeup. We present a content analysis of 145 YouTube videos to demonstrate visually impaired individuals’ unique practices before, during, and after doing makeup. Based on the makeup practices, we then conducted semi-structured interviews with 12 visually impaired people to discuss their perceptions of and challenges with the makeup process in more depth. Overall, through our findings and discussion, we present novel perceptions of makeup from visually impaired individuals (e.g., broader representations of blindness and beauty). The existing challenges provide opportunities for future research to address learning barriers, insufficient feedback, and physical and environmental barriers, making the experience of doing makeup more accessible to people with visual impairments.

Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (DHH) users face accessibility challenges during in-person and remote meetings. While emerging use of applications incorporating automatic speech recognition (ASR) is promising, more user-interface and user-experience research is needed. While co-design methods could elucidate designs for such applications, COVID-19 has interrupted in-person research. This study describes a novel methodology for conducting online co-design workshops with 18 DHH and hearing participant pairs to investigate ASR-supported mobile and videoconferencing technologies along two design dimensions: Correcting errors in ASR output and implementing notification systems for influencing speaker behaviors. Our methodological findings include an analysis of communication modalities and strategies participants used, use of an online collaborative whiteboarding tool, and how participants reconciled differences in ideas. Finally, we present guidelines for researchers interested in online DHH co-design methodologies, enabling greater geographically diversity among study participants even beyond the current pandemic.

Despite increasing work investigating the accessibility of research tools, most accessibility research has traditionally focused on popular, mainstream, or web technologies. We investigated barriers and workarounds blind and low vision doctoral students in computing-intensive disciplines experienced and engaged, respectively, when using advanced technical tools for research tasks. We conducted an observation and interview study with eight current and former Ph.D. students, closely analyzing the accessibility of specific tasks. Our findings contextualize how inaccessible tools complicate research tasks, adding time and effort, and exacerbating social entanglements in collaborative relationships. This work contributes empirical data that extricates how in/accessibility of advanced technical tools used in research influences productivity and collegial efforts.

Listening to podcasts is a popular way for people to spend their time. However, little focus has been given to how accessible podcast platforms are for Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (DHH) people. We present a DHH-centered accessible podcast platform prototype developed with user-centered design. Our proposed design was constructed through semi-structured interviews (n=7) and prototype design feedback sessions (n=8) with DHH users. We encourage podcast platform designers to adopt our design recommendations to make podcasts more inclusive for DHH people and recommend how podcast hosts can make their shows more accessible.

In interaction or user-centered design practices, it is common to employ interviews and think-aloud techniques to gather data about user behavior. These techniques enable researchers to learn about how users think and use technologies during the design and user testing process. However, such techniques involve accessing audio feedback, which may require workarounds if the researcher identifies as deaf or hard of hearing (DHH). We report on a project led by a DHH researcher in which workarounds to audio access resulted in methodological changes. We discuss the implications of these adjustments.

Few students with disabilities transition from undergraduate to graduate programs. Graduate students often receive ineffective and insufficient accommodations, including lack of support specific to graduate students, because disability services policies are shaped by undergraduate experiences. To understand how disability services offices accommodate graduate students: we (1) critically analyzed disability services websites of 18 U.S. institutions, and (2) interviewed 17 disability services staff. Disability services websites publicly present institutional accommodation policies and guidelines, and staff are responsible for identifying, providing, and implementing reasonable accommodations. We found that policies may be interpreted differently depending on specific student circumstances. We discuss our findings in two main themes: (a) Policies and attitudes ascribed to disability, technology, and faculty, and (b) Impacts of policies and perspectives on accommodation decisions for graduate students. The contributions of this work include an empirical investigation of institutional support for disabled graduate students and suggestions for how to improve support from disability services offices to empower students.

High-fidelity prototyping tools are used by software designers and developers to iron out interface details without full implementation. However, the lack of visual accessibility in these tools creates a barrier for designers who may use screen readers, such as those who are vision impaired. We assessed conformance of four prototyping tools (Sketch, Adobe XD, Balsamiq, UXPin) with accessibility guidelines, using two screen readers (Narrator and VoiceOver), focusing our analysis on GUI element accessibility and critical workflows used to create prototypes. We found few tools were fully accessible, with 45.9% of GUI elements meeting accessibility criteria (34.2% partially supported accessibility, 19.9% not supporting accessibility). Accessibility issues stymied efforts to create prototypes using screen readers. Though no screen reader-tool pairs were completely accessible, the most accessible pairs were VoiceOver-Sketch, VoiceOver-Balsamiq, and Narrator-Balsamiq. We recommend prioritizing improved accessibility for input and control instruction, alternative text, focus order, canvas element properties, and keyboard operations.

Despite efforts to support students with disabilities in higher education, few continue to pursue doctoral degrees in computing. We conducted an interview study with 12 blind and low vision, and 7 deaf and hard of hearing current and former doctoral students in computing to understand how graduate students adjust to inaccessibility and ineffective accommodations. We asked participants how they worked around inaccessibility, managed ineffective accommodations, and advocated for tools and services. Employing a lens of ableism in our analysis, we found that participants’ extra effort to address accessibility gaps gave rise to a burden of survival, which they sustained to meet expectations of graduate-level productivity. We recommend equitable solutions that acknowledge taken-for-granted workarounds and that actively address inaccessibility in the graduate school context.

Increasingly, support for students with disabilities in post-secondary education has boosted enrollment and graduates rates. Yet, such successes are not translated to doctoral degrees. For example, in 2018, the National Science Foundation reported 3% of math and computer science doctorate recipients identified as having a visual limitation while 1.2% identified as having a hearing limitation. To better understand why few students with disabilities pursue PhDs in computing and related fields, we conducted an interview study with 19 current and former graduate students who identified as blind or low vision, or deaf or hard of hearing. We asked participants about challenges or barriers they encountered in graduate school. We asked about accommodations they received, or did not receive, and about different forms of support. We found that a wide range of inaccessibility issues in research, courses, and in managing accommodations impacted student progress. Contributions from this work include identifying two forms of access inequality that emerged: (1) access differential: the gap between the access that non/disabled students experience, and (2) inequitable access: the degree of inadequacy of existing accommodations to address inaccessibility.

With an increasing demand for computing professionals with skills in accessibility, it is important for university faculty to select effective methods for educating computing students about barriers faced by users with disabilities and approaches to improving accessibility. While some prior work had evaluated accessibility educational interventions, many prior studies have consisted of firsthand reports from faculty or short-term evaluations. This paper reports on the results of a systematic evaluation of methods for teaching accessibility from a longitudinal study across 29 sections of a human-computer interaction course (required for students in a computing degree program), as taught by 10 distinct professors, throughout four years, with over 400 students. A control condition (course without accessibility content) was compared to four intervention conditions: week of lectures on accessibility, team design project requiring some accessibility consideration, interaction with someone with a disability, and collaboration with a team member with a disability. Comparing survey data immediately before and after the course, we found that the Lectures, Projects, and Interaction conditions were effective in increasing students' likelihood to consider people with disabilities on a design scenario, awareness of accessibility barriers, and knowledge of technical approaches for improving accessibility - with students in the Team Member condition having higher scores on the final measure only. However, comparing survey responses from students immediately before the course and from approximately 2 years later, almost no significant gains were observed, suggesting that interventions within a single course are insufficient for producing long-term changes in measures of students’ accessibility learning. This study contributes to empirical knowledge to inform university faculty in selecting effective methods for teaching accessibility, and it motivates further research on how to achieve long-term changes in accessibility knowledge, e.g. by reinforcing accessibility throughout a degree program.

Recent interest in accessibility emphasizes including it in computer science curriculum as key to producing effective computing professionals. Despite a general consensus that teaching accessibility in computing curriculum is good, there exist few tools and resources to support instructors in higher education. To better understand the relationship between accessibility in curriculum and research, we conducted a systematic literature review of papers in computing education. We analyzed the papers for the courses accessibility is covered in, the topics that are covered and pedagogies and assessment approaches that are used. Across this body of work, we found a number of key learning objectives commonly covered in computing education research, though it appeared the research did not evenly cover these objectives throughout curricula, nor did the research systematically investigate how learning objectives were integrated. Based on these results, we offer suggestions for future directions of accessibility education research and curriculum building.

We investigate the degree to which undergraduate computing students in a United States university consider accessibility several years after instruction. Prior work has found that cultural and ethical norms become ingrained early in STEM professionals’ careers; so, we focus on students approaching graduation and after an internship experience, who are just getting started in their career. In semi-structured interviews, a majority of these final-year computing students (14 of 16) indicated that they were not motivated to improve their skills in accessibility, attributing this to not being required to consider accessibility in subsequent work or classes, not seeing accessibility as an essential skill in their profession , and challenges due to a learn-it-on-your-own approach in computing. Participants suggested instructional methods and topics that they believed would have better prepared them for considering accessibility. A survey of 114 additional final-year students revealed similar themes, including that students did not personally view accessibility training as essential career preparation. Prior research has largely focused on evaluating short-term changes in students’ knowledge after an educational intervention. Therefore, by focusing on students several years after an intervention, this work highlights lingering barriers for university programs in promoting accessibility among rising computing professionals.

Personal technologies are rarely designed to be accessible to disabled people, partly due to the perceived challenge of including disability in design. Through design workshops, we addressed this challenge by infusing user-centered design activities with Design for Social Accessibility-a perspective emphasizing social aspects of accessibility-to investigate how professional designers can leverage social factors to include accessibility in design. We focused on how professional designers incorporated Design for Social Accessibility's three tenets: (1) to work with users with and without visual impairments; (2) to consider social and functional factors; (3) to employ tools-a framework and method cards-to raise awareness and prompt reflection on social aspects toward accessible design. We then interviewed designers about their workshop experiences. We found DSA to be an effective set of tools and strategies incorporating social/functional and non/disabled perspectives that helped designers create accessible design.

Industry demand for software developers with knowledge of accessibility has increased substantially in recent years. However, there is little knowledge about the prevalence of higher education teaching about accessibility or faculty's perceived barriers to teaching accessibility. To address this gap, we surveyed 14,176 computing and information science faculty in the United States. We received a representative sample of at least one response from 318 of the 352 institutions we surveyed, totaling 1,857 responses. We found that 175 institutions (50%) had at least one instructor teaching accessibility and that no fewer than 2.5% of faculty overall teach accessibility. Faculty that teach accessibility are twice as likely to be female, to have expertise in HCI and software engineering, and to know people with disabilities. The most critical barriers to teaching accessibility that faculty reported were the absence of clear and discipline-specific accessibility learning objectives and the lack of faculty knowledge about accessibility. Faculty desired resources that were specific to the areas of computing in which they teach rather than general accessibility resources and guidelines.

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.

Few research studies focus on how the use of assistive technologies is affected by social interaction among people. We present an interview study of 20 individuals to determine how assistive technology use is affected by social and professional contexts and interactions. We found that specific assistive devices sometimes marked their users as having disabilities; that functional access took priority over feeling self-conscious when using assistive technologies; and that two misperceptions pervaded assistive technology use: (1) that assistive devices could functionally eliminate a disability, and (2) that people with disabilities would be helpless without their devices. Our findings provide further evidence that accessibility should be built into mainstream technologies. When this is not feasible, assistive devices should incorporate cutting edge technologies and strive to be designed for social acceptability, a new design approach we propose here.

Recently, Wobbrock et al. (2008) derived a predictive model of pointing accuracy to complement Fitts' law's predictive model of pointing speed. However, their model was based on one-dimensional (1-D) horizontal movement, while applications of such a model require two dimensions (2-D). In this paper, the pointing error model is investigated for 2-D pointing in a study of 21 participants performing a time-matching task on the ISO 9241-9 ring-of-circles layout. Results show that the pointing error model holds well in 2-D. If univariate endpoint deviation (SDx) is used, regressing on N=72 observed vs. predicted error rate points yields R2=.953. If bivariate endpoint deviation (SDx,y) is used, regression yields R2=.936. For both univariate and bivariate models, the magnitudes of observed and predicted error rates are comparable.

Fitts' law (1954) characterizes pointing speed-accuracy performance as throughput, whose invariance to target distances (A) and sizes (W) is known. However, it is unknown whether throughput and Fitts' law models in general are invariant to task dimensionality (1-D vs. 2-D), whether univariate (SDx) or bivariate (SDx,y) endpoint deviation is used, whether throughput is calculated using the mean-of-means approach or the slope-inverse approach, or whether Guiard's (2009) Form - Scale experiment design is used instead of fully crossed A-W factors. We empirically investigate the confluence of these issues, finding that Fitts' law is largely invariant across 1-D and 2-D, provided that univariate endpoint deviation (SDx) is used in both, but that for 2-D pointing data, bivariate endpoint deviation (SDx,y) results in better Fitts' law models. Also, the mean-of-means throughput calculation exhibits lower variance across subjects and dimensionalities than the slope-inverse calculation. In light of these and other findings, we offer recommendations for pointing evaluations, especially in 2-D. We also offer an evaluation tool called Fitts Study to facilitate comparisons.

People with disabilities use assistive devices both to bridge accessibility gaps in everyday tasks, and to augment inaccessible technologies, such as desktop computers. This interview study investigates how people with disabilities are affected when using assistive devices in professional and social situations. Participants were asked about different contexts of use, and how people around them reacted to their devices. Key findings were that individuals experienced issues of self consciousness and empowerment when using assistive devices and that specific aspects of assistive device design, such as size and perceived sleekness, contributed to these feelings.

Computer users with motor impairments face major challenges with conventional mouse pointing. These challenges are mostly due to fine pointing corrections at the final stages of target acquisition. To reduce the need for correction-phase pointing and to lessen the effects of small target size on acquisition difficulty, we introduce four enhanced area cursors, two of which rely on magnification and two of which use goal crossing. In a study with motor-impaired and able-bodied users, we compared the new designs to the point and Bubble cursors, the latter of which had not been evaluated for users with motor impairments. Two enhanced area cursors, the Visual-Motor-Magnifier and Click-and-Cross, were the most successful new designs for users with motor impairments, reducing selection time for small targets by 19%, corrective submovements by 45%, and error rate by up to 82% compared to the point cursor. Although the Bubble cursor also improved performance, participants with motor impairments unanimously preferred the enhanced area cursors.

While software is increasingly being improved to enhance access and use, software interfaces nonetheless often create barriers for people who are blind. In response, the blind computer user develops workarounds, strategies to overcome the constraints of a physical and social world engineered for the sighted. This paper describes an interview and observational study of a blind college student interacting with various technologies within her home. Structured around Blythe, Monk and Park's Technology Biographies, these experience centered sessions focus not only on technology function, but on the relationship of function to the meanings and values that this student attributes to technology use in different settings. Studying a single user across a range of devices and tasks provides a broader and more nuanced understanding of the contexts and causes of task failure and of the workarounds employed than is possible with a more narrowly focused usability study. Themes that were revealed across a range of tasks include the importance for technologies to not "mark" the user as being blind within a predominantly sighted social world, to support user independence through portability and user control, and to allow user "resets" and brute-force fallbacks in the face of persistent task failure.

This project reports on an observational and interview study of a non-sighted person to develop design insights for enhancing interactions between a blind person and everyday technological artifacts found in their home such as wristwatches, cell phones or software applications. Analyzing situations where work-arounds compensate for task failures reveals important insights for future artifact design for the blind such as the value of socialization, tactile and audio feedback, and facilitation of user independence.