Non-Visual Cooking: Exploring Practices and Challenges of Meal Preparation by People with Visual Impairments

Abstract

The reliance on vision for tasks related to cooking and eating healthy can present barriers to cooking for oneself and achieving proper nutrition. There has been little research exploring cooking practices and challenges faced by people with visual impairments. We present a content analysis of 122 YouTube videos to highlight the cooking practices of visually impaired people, and we describe detailed practices for 12 different cooking activities (e.g., cutting and chopping, measuring, testing food for doneness). Based on the cooking practices, we also conducted semi-structured interviews with 12 visually impaired people who have cooking experience and show existing challenges, concerns, and risks in cooking (e.g., tracking the status of tasks in progress, verifying whether things are peeled or cleaned thoroughly). We further discuss opportunities to support the current practices and improve the independence of people with visual impairments in cooking (e.g., zero-touch interactions for cooking). Overall, our findings provide guidance for future research exploring various assistive technologies to help people cook without relying on vision.CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in accessibility.

AVscript: Accessible Video Editing with Audio-Visual Scripts

“…To address this challenge, AVscript provides access to visual content including: a summary of key visual moments via scene descriptions, a list of low-level objects via inspect mode, and ondemand access to visuals of interest via search. While creators using AVscript occasionally listened to the video and scene descriptions linearly (similar to how BLV audiences currently listen to audio descriptions that describe visual content in a video alongside the video narration [40,57]), creators also used scene descriptions for new use cases including skimming the outline of scene descriptions to gain an overview of visual content, and clicking on scene descriptions to navigate to video scenes (similar to how sighted video creators use video keyframes to navigate with timeline-based video editing tools [4,6]). Scene description-based navigation helped address an existing challenge for video creators (C4.…”

“…To collect videos demonstrating how BLV creators edit videos, we first searched YouTube for all combinations of a set of vision-related keywords (blind, low vision, visual impairment, screen reader), and a set of video editing keywords (editing videos, making videos, creating videos), following prior work [40,41]. For each search phrase, we included all unique videos that had a title related to vision and video editing and stopped the search when the results of an entire search page were irrelevant.…”

A Contextual Inquiry of People with Vision Impairments in Cooking

“…Prior research has highlighted different practices and challenges that people with vision impairments have in cooking activities [5,39,63]. For example, Li et al [39] uncovered various difficulties for people with vision impairments while cooking, such as measuring, organizing space, tracking objects, and quality inspection. Among the tasks described by people with vision impairments in the kitchen [5,39,63], such as tracking objects and organizing space, many are relevant to the identification of different contextual information of objects (e.g., shape, color, location).…”

“…For example, Li et al [39] uncovered various difficulties for people with vision impairments while cooking, such as measuring, organizing space, tracking objects, and quality inspection. Among the tasks described by people with vision impairments in the kitchen [5,39,63], such as tracking objects and organizing space, many are relevant to the identification of different contextual information of objects (e.g., shape, color, location). Despite these existing explorations into the cooking experiences of people with vision impairments, there remain unclear regarding what contextual information of objects is needed across different cooking procedures.…”

“…[TASK 2: Specific Cooking-related Activities]: Following the completion of Task 1, participants were further engaged in specific cooking-related activities to gain a deeper insight into their procedural methods and information requirements. Drawing from prior research findings [39], we chose eight key activities that epitomize the essential cooking tasks for individuals with vision impairments that are relevant to object identification. These activities encompassed: 1) identification of ingredients and food items, 2) recognition of cookware and utensils, 3) precise measurement, 4) monitoring of cooking progress, 5) the process of serving food, 6) ensuring safety measures, 7) maintaining kitchen organization, and 8) executing grocery shopping.…”