Command-line interfaces (CLIs) remain a popular tool among developers and system administrators. Since CLIs are text-based interfaces, they are sometimes considered accessible alternatives to predominantly visual developer tools like IDEs. However, there is no systematic evaluation of the accessibility of CLIs in the literature. In this paper, we describe two studies with 12 developers on their experience of using CLIs with screen readers. Our findings show that CLIs have their own set of accessibility issues - the most important being CLIs are unstructured text interfaces. Based on our results, we provide a set of recommendations for improving the accessibility of command-line interfaces.

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.

We explored how emotional cues presented in visual and haptic modalities interact. We constructed an affective haptic dataset, and used the emotional visual stimuli from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS). Participants were asked to rate the visual stimuli, haptic stimuli and visualhaptic stimuli. Analysis of the results indicates that the presence of haptic stimulus affects the arousal of the visual stimulus, but does not affect the valence significantly. We further explored this interaction in terms of the intensity, frequency, waveform and rhythm of the haptic stimuli. We then provide a set of guidelines on visual-haptic interaction that could be used in design of multimodal affective feedback.

Recent research in human computation has focused on improving the quality of work done by crowd workers on crowdsourcing platforms. Multiple approaches have been adopted like filtering crowd workers through qualification tasks, and aggregating responses from multiple crowd workers to obtain consensus. We investigate here how improving the presentation of the task itself by using cognitively inspired features affects the performance of crowd workers. We illustrate this with a case-study for the task of extracting text from scanned images. We generated six task-presentation designs by modifying two parameters - visual saliency of the target fields and working memory requirements - and conducted experiments on Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) and with an eye-tracker in the lab setting. Our results identify which task-design parameters (e.g. highlighting target fields) result in improved performance, and which ones do not (e.g. reducing the number of distractors). In conclusion, we claim that the use of cognitively inspired features for task design is a powerful technique for maximizing the performance of crowd workers.