Collaborative Accessibility

Abstract

In recent decades, great technological strides have been made toward enabling people who are blind to live independent, successful lives. However, there has been relatively little progress towards understanding the social, collaborative needs of this population, particularly in the domestic setting. We conducted semi-structured interviews in the homes of 10 pairs of close companions in which one partner was blind and one was not. We found that partners engaged in collaborative accessibility by taking active roles in co-creating an accessible environment. Due to their different visual abilities, however, partners sometimes encountered difficulties managing divergent needs and engaging in shared experiences. We describe outstanding challenges to creating accessible shared home spaces and outline new research and technology opportunities for supporting collaborative accessibility in the home.

"I can do everything but see!" -- How People with Vision Impairments Negotiate their Abilities in Social Contexts

“…This presents a form of inter-dependency that not only helps extend their abilities, it is linked to a sense of belonging and enjoyable experiences. This binding of assistance with relationships is also described by Branham and Kane [9] in the co-creation of an accessible home, something that can be both a burden and an aid to relational intimacy. Contrary to a previously strong focus on independence in the contexts of AT design and disability, we suggest that designers think about how their technology can help enable collective sense-making experiences, and how it sits within these important social relationships to avoid risks of interfering with them.…”

“…Branham and Kane [9] for instance interviewed people with VI and their sighted partners to understand how they jointly constructed accessibility in their homes. They describe this as a dynamic process that involves configuring objects or activities in a predictable way; spatially organizing and adding tactiles to items; or rehearsing routines.…”

“…This start to foreground the relevance of social and material aspects of the context for accessibility. Further, they describe how involving others as assistants was carefully negotiated, describing concerns that other people in the workplace may perceive a blind person as needy rather than competent [10]; and how creating shared, accessible experiences between partners at home [9] serves not only practical means, but is entangled with inter-personal intimacies.…”

“…This is somewhat echoed in assistive crowdsourcing systems such as VizWiz ii [5,15], a service that allows people with VI to pose questions about a visual problem (captured through a photo) either to Mechanical Turk iii or peoples' wider social network on Facebook [8]; as well as in ethnographic work of co-constructed accessibility in the home [9] and at work [10]. However, outside routine environments in which access to information can be pre-configured or better planned for, the reaching out to other people for help becomes a different challenge for technology to assist.…”

“…In line with the "social model" of disability [39,45], this orientation places the responsibility of addressing disability on everyone collectively [cf. 9,10], including technology designers.…”