Computer vision systems to help blind users are becoming increasingly common yet often these systems are not intelligible. Our work investigates the intelligibility of a wearable computer vision system to help blind users locate and identify people in their vicinity. Providing a continuous stream of information, this system allows us to explore intelligibility through interaction and instructions, going beyond studies of intelligibility that focus on explaining a decision a computer vision system might make. In a study with 13 blind users, we explored whether varying instructions (either basic or enhanced) about how the system worked would change blind users' experience of the system. We found offering a more detailed set of instructions did not affect how successful users were using the system nor their perceived workload. We did, however, find evidence of significant differences in what they knew about the system, and they employed different, and potentially more effective, use strategies. Our findings have important implications for researchers and designers of computer vision systems for blind users, as well more general implications for understanding what it means to make interactive computer vision systems intelligible.
CCS CONCEPTS• Human-centered computing~Human computer interaction (HCI) • Human-centered computing~Accessibility • Computing methodologies~Computer vision
This contribution to the special issue advances an ethnographic method which directs the critical project of re-imagining diversity towards studies of how difference emerges in fieldwork encounters. Drawing on my experiences of researching without eyesight, I urge students and teachers of anthropology to acknowledge the value of embodied research methods for examining social and corporeal differences in researcher-participant relationships. Firstly, I call attention to moments when embodied fieldwork may be resisted and how these are expressed as naturalised differences between researchers and participants. To deconstruct such naturalisations, I devise contact movement as a method which allows researchers to embody how these ethnographic tensions, or indeed differences, are negotiated between researchers and their participants. Ultimately, contact movement eagerly re-imagines diversity through a methodological rethink that permits ethnographers to embody and explore the collaborative production of difference in their intersubjective relationships, within the field and beyond.
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