Imagining Artificial Intelligence Applications with People with Visual Disabilities using Tactile Ideation

Abstract

This is the accepted version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Permanent repository link ABSTRACTThere has been a surge in artificial intelligence (AI) technologies co-opted by or designed for people with visual disabilities. Researchers and engineers have pushed technical boundaries in areas such as computer vision, natural language processing, location inference, and wearable computing. But what do people with visual disabilities imagine as their own technological future? To explore this question, we developed and carried out tactile ideation workshops with participants in the UK and India. Our participants generated a large and diverse set of ideas, most focusing on ways to meet needs related to social interaction. In some cases, this was a matter of recognizing people. In other cases, they wanted to be able to participate in social situations with their disability being unobtrusive. It was striking that this finding was consistent across UK and India despite substantial cultural and infrastructural differences. In this paper, we describe a new technique for working with people with visual disabilities to imagine new technologies that are tuned to their needs and aspirations. Based on our experience with these workshops, we provide a set of social dimensions whereby users' social needs and desires are a more deliberate consideration for assistive technology design.

Design in the Public Square

“…Technology is frequently described as a force for inclusion, enabling people with disabilities to participate in activities that might otherwise be unavailable to them. Similarly, a signifcant efort has been put forth to formulate methodological approaches that include people with disability in the design process [30,31,33,51,57]. What we saw in this work, however, is another potential future, one in which people with disabilities and others with diferent abilities can participate together, not only in the design and use of assistive technologies but also in broader contexts (e.g., in sports or recreation).…”

“…According to Morrison et al, in a multi-workshop study using "tactile ideation techniques", blind participants struggled with the ideation process while prototyping with physical objects in a participatory design setting. Despite enjoying the process of manipulating tactile objects, participants with less vision were taxed "in a way that did not encourage ideation", highlighting the challenges for researchers to bring blind and low vision users into the design process efectively [33].…”

The Care Work of Access

“…A somewhat overlapping and formative thread of research is work examining how people with vision impairments (and passersby) make sense of and interact in social situations [1], [10], [11], [56], [76], [77], [79], [80], [86], [95], and whether this might offer opportunities to make greater use of one's senses in conjunction with the adaptive and learning capabilities of AI [3], [58], [65], [78], [92], [95]. In two separate studies, Thieme et al [80] and Williams et al [86] accompanied people with vision impairments on social and navigation activities, examining the myriad ways people work together and triangulate cues from their traveling companions, technologies, and environments to get where they want to go and, critically, to enjoy themselves.…”

“…In the data driven approaches popular in contemporary AI systems and being introduced into ATs [4], [8], [27], [40], [41], [49], [53], [58], [78], [88], [90], [91], [92], [93], [94], [95] these mundane attunements present a challenge. When what matters in the work of access is open, attuned in response to so many contingencies, how do we find datasets that might afford aggregation in any meaningful sense and that lead to the identification of actionable patterns of interaction that aren't too general?…”

Impact of Artificial Intelligence in Special Need Education to Promote Inclusive Pedagogy

“…It is composed of information agents that can be either in the physical form as devices (such as Robots or can be virtual such as software. According to Morrison [10], as AI matures, it becomes increasingly important to understand the kind of things that people with disability would require as a part of their technology tool kit. The benefits of AI have been acknowledged in education; however, the research fraternity has started exploring its benefits for people with special needs in education [5].…”