Paula Conn
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Today’s smartphone interactions are typically designed with one primary preset, accompanied by customization settings that can be manually adjusted. To promote the creation of contextually aware experiences, researchers have highlighted the factors that influence mobile device usage in the ability-based design framework. This paper expands upon existing frameworks and contributes to an empirical understanding of smartphone accessibility. Through a 10-day longitudinal diary study and video interview with 24 individuals who do and do not identify as having a disability, the research also illustrates the reactions of reattempt, adaptation, and avoidance, which were used in response to a lack of smartphone accessibility. Despite experiencing scenarios where accessibility settings could be leveraged, 20 out of 24 participants did not use accessibility settings on their smartphone. A total of 12 out of 24 participants tried accessibility settings on their smartphones, however identifying accessibility was not for them. This work highlights the need to shift current design practices to better serve the accessibility community.
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Packaging Accessibility: Developing a Comparison Tool for Structural Designs
Richard Abisla
Sanjay Batra
Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting, Sage Journals (2021), 2324–2329
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In this work, we synthesize 27 emerging research studies and standards to develop a resource that highlights accessibility risks of new design concepts. Prior studies have identified key factors that influence packaging accessibility: we summarize major themes and validate our findings through a Human Factors usability study. Results suggest that the design comparison tool can contribute to more accessible packaging, yielding a statistically significant difference in participants’ preference rankings. While existing methodologies evaluate a package’s accessibility at the final stages of the development process, this work suggests that usability problems can be surfaced as early as design conceptualization.
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Wearable Subtitles: Augmenting Spoken Communication with Lightweight Eyewear for All-day Captioning
Kevin Balke
Dmitrii Votintcev
Thad Starner
Bonnie Chinh
Benoit Corda
Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA (2020), 1108–1120
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Mobile solutions can help transform speech and sound into visual representations for people who are deaf or hard-of-hearing (DHH). However, where handheld phones present challenges, head-worn displays (HWDs) could further communication through privately transcribed text, hands-free use, improved mobility, and socially acceptable interactions.
Wearable Subtitles is a lightweight 3D-printed proof-of-concept HWD that explores augmenting communication through sound transcription for a full workday. Using a low-power microcontroller architecture, we enable up to 15 hours of continuous use. We describe a large survey (n=501) and three user studies with 24 deaf/hard-of-hearing participants which inform our development and help us refine our prototypes. Our studies and prior research identify critical challenges for the adoption of HWDs which we address through extended battery life, lightweight and balanced mechanical design (54 g), fitting options, and form factors that are compatible with current social norms.
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