Even when they are able to secure employment, people with cognitive disabilities typically encounter significant difficulties in the workplace. In this paper, we focus on Mixed-Ability workplaces: work settings in which people without disabilities and with different types of disabilities collaborate on a daily basis. The case study for our exploratory research is a university library that has been able to support a mixed-ability work setting for over four years. We describe how a theory from cognitive linguistics (Conceptual Metaphor Theory) can be used to explore the challenges that people encounter in mixed-ability workplaces, identify the cognitive processes that differ between neurotypical team leaders and workers with cognitive disabilities, and translate these findings into design recommendations for embodied technologies that support mixed-ability workplaces.

Most user studies of navigation applications for people with visual impairments have been limited by existing localization technologies, and appropriate instruction types and information needs have been determined through interviews. Using Wizard-of- Oz navigation interfaces, we explored how people with visual impairments respond to different instruction intervals, precision, output modalities, and landmark use during in situ navigation tasks. We present the results of an experimental study with nine people with visual impairments, and provide direction and open questions for future work on adaptive navigation interfaces.

Crowd-powered systems that help people are difficult to scale and sustain because human labor is expensive and worker pools are difficult to grow. To address this problem we introduce the idea of social microvolunteering, a type of intermediated friendsourcing in which a person can provide access to their friends as potential workers for microtasks supporting causes that they care about. We explore this idea by creating Visual Answers, an exemplar social microvolunteering application for Facebook that posts visual questions from people who are blind. We present results of a survey of 350 participants on the concept of social microvolunteering, and a deployment of the Visual Answers application with 91 participants, which collected 618 high-quality answers to questions asked over 12 days, illustrating the feasibility of the approach.

Blind people often seek answers to their visual questions from remote sources, however, the commonly adopted single-image, single-response model does not always guarantee enough bandwidth between users and sources. This is especially true when questions concern large sets of information, or spatial layout, e.g., where is there to sit in this area, what tools are on this work bench, or what do the buttons on this machine do? Our RegionSpeak system addresses this problem by providing an accessible way for blind users to (i) combine visual information across multiple photographs via image stitching, em (ii) quickly collect labels from the crowd for all relevant objects contained within the resulting large visual area in parallel, and (iii) then interactively explore the spatial layout of the objects that were labeled. The regions and descriptions are displayed on an accessible touchscreen interface, which allow blind users to interactively explore their spatial layout. We demonstrate that workers from Amazon Mechanical Turk are able to quickly and accurately identify relevant regions, and that asking them to describe only one region at a time results in more comprehensive descriptions of complex images. RegionSpeak can be used to explore the spatial layout of the regions identified. It also demonstrates broad potential for helping blind users to answer difficult spatial layout questions.

Social media offers a targeted way for mainstream technology companies to communicate with people with disabilities about the accessibility problems that they face. While companies have started to engage with users on social media about accessibility, they differ greatly in terms of their approach and how well they support the ways in which their users want to engage. In this paper, we describe current use patterns of six corporate accessibility teams and their users on Twitter, and present an analysis of these interactions. We find that while many users want to interact directly with companies about accessibility, companies prefer to redirect them to other channels and use Twitter for broadcast messages promoting their accessibility work instead. Our analysis demonstrates that users want to use social media to become part of the process of improving accessibility of mainstream technology, and suggests the extent to which a company is able to leverage this input depends greatly on how they choose to present themselves and interact on social media.

People with disabilities can be reluctant to friendsource help from their own friends for fear of appearing dependent or annoying. Our social microvolunteering approach has volunteers post friendsourcing tasks on behalf of people with disabilities. We demonstrate this approach via a Facebook application that answers visual questions on behalf of blind users.

Blind people face a range of accessibility challenges in their everyday lives, from reading the text on a package of food to traveling independently in a new place. Answering general questions about one's visual surroundings remains well beyond the capabilities of fully automated systems, but recent systems are showing the potential of engaging on-demand human workers (the crowd) to answer visual questions. The input to such systems has generally been a single image, which can limit the interaction with a worker to one question; or video streams where systems have paired the end user with a single worker, limiting the benefits of the crowd. In this paper, we introduce Chorus:View, a system that assists users over the course of longer interactions by engaging workers in a continuous conversation with the user about a video stream from the user's mobile device. We demonstrate the benefit of using multiple crowd workers instead of just one in terms of both latency and accuracy, then conduct a study with 10 blind users that shows Chorus:View answers common visual questions more quickly and accurately than existing approaches. We conclude with a discussion of users' feedback and potential future work on interactive crowd support of blind users.

The challenges faced by blind people in their everyday lives are not well understood. In this paper, we report on the findings of a large-scale study of the visual questions that blind people would like to have answered. As part of this year-long study, 5,329 blind users asked 40,748 questions about photographs that they took from their iPhones using an application called VizWiz Social. We present a taxonomy of the types of questions asked, report on a number of features of the questions and accompanying photographs, and discuss how individuals changed how they used VizWiz Social over time. These results improve our understanding of the problems blind people face, and may help motivate new projects more accurately targeted to help blind people live more independently in their everyday lives.

Recent work has shown the potential of having remote humans answer visual questions that blind users have. On the surface social networking sites (SNSs) offer an attractive free source of human-powered answers that can be personalized to the user. In this paper, we explore the potential of blind users asking visual questions to their social networks. We present the first formal study of how blind people use social networking sites via a survey of 191 blind adults. We also explore whether blind users find SNSs an appropriate venue for Q&A through a log analysis of questions asked using VizWiz Social, an iPhone app with over 5,000 users, which lets blind users ask questions to either the crowd or friends. We then report findings of a field experiment with 23 blind VizWiz Social users, which explored question asking on VizWiz Social in the presence of monetary costs for non-social sources. We find that blind people have a large presence on social networking sites, but do not see them as an appropriate venue for asking questions due to high perceived social costs.

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.

Many new technologies have been developed to assist people who are visually impaired in learning about their environment, but there is little understanding of their motivations for using these tools. Our tool VizWiz allows users to take a picture using their mobile phone, ask a question about the picture's contents, and receive an answer in nearly realtime. This study investigates patterns in the questions that visually impaired users ask about their surroundings, and presents the benefits and limitations of responses from both human and computerized sources.