Navigation assistive technologies have been designed to support individuals with visual impairments during independent mobility by providing sensory augmentation and contextual awareness of their surroundings. Such information is habitually provided through predefned audio-haptic interaction paradigms. However, individual capabilities, preferences and behavior of people with visual impairments are heterogeneous, and may change due to experience, context and necessity. Therefore, the circumstances and modalities for providing navigation assistance need to be personalized to different users, and through time for each user.
We conduct a study with 13 blind participants to explore how the desirability of messages provided during assisted navigation varies based on users' navigation preferences and expertise. The participants are guided through two different routes, one without prior knowledge and one previously studied and traversed. The guidance is provided through turn-by-turn instructions, enriched with contextual information about the environment. During navigation and follow-up interviews, we uncover that participants have diversifed needs for navigation instructions based on their abilities and preferences. Our study motivates the design of future navigation systems capable of verbosity level personalization in order to keep the users engaged in the current situational context while minimizing distractions.
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Public Transit Accessibility: Blind Passengers Speak Out
Riding public transit can be confusing for everyone, especially in an unfamiliar environment. One needs to figure out which transportation lines to take to reach a destination, when and where to catch a bus or a train, when to exit, and how to negotiate transfers. For those with sensorial or cognitive disa- bilities, these problems become even more daunting. Several technological ap- proaches have been proposed to facilitate use of public transit for everyone. For any assistive technology to be successful, though, it is imperative that it is de- veloped from the ground up with a clear understanding of the intended users’ needs and requirements, and possibly with a direct participation of these users throughout the project lifecycle. In this study, we conduct a focus group with blind participants, designed to highlight the main issues, problems, and limita- tions with the current transit system in our local area as well as the perception of the participants our proposed RouteMe2 technology. We found two core categories of issues faced by blind travelers: (1) spatial/location awareness, and (2) temporal/ time awareness. Configurability and accessibility were the most desired features requested for a new transit information app.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1632158
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10063454
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Computers Helping People with Special Needs
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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null (Ed.)In conjunction with the increasing ubiquity of technology, computing educators have identified the need for pedagogical engagement with ethical awareness and moral reasoning. Typical approaches to incorporating ethics in computing curricula have focused primarily on abstract methods, principles, or paradigms of ethical reasoning, with relatively little focus on examining and developing students’ pragmatic awareness of ethics as grounded in their everyday work practices. In this paper, we identify and describe computing students’ negotiation of values as they engage in authentic design problems through a lab protocol study. We collected data from four groups of three students each, with each group including participants from either undergraduate User Experience Design students, Industrial Engineering students, or a mix of both. We used a thematic analysis approach to identify the roles that students took on to address the design prompt. Through our analysis, we found that the students took on a variety of “dark” roles that resulted in manipulation of the user and prioritization of stakeholder needs over user needs, with a focus either on building solutions or building rationale for design decisions. We found these roles to actively propagate through design discourses, impacting other designers in ways that frequently reinforced unethical decision making. Even when students were aware of ethical concerns based on their educational training, this awareness did not consistently result in ethically-sound decisions. These findings indicate the need for additional ethical supports to inform everyday computing practice, including means of actively identifying and balancing negative societal impacts of design decisions. The roles we have identified may productively support the development of pragmatically-focused ethical training in computing education, while adding more precision to future analysis of computing student discourses and outputs.more » « less
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In the United States, public defenders (lawyers assigned to people accused of crimes who cannot afford a private attorney) serve as an essential bulwark against wrongful arrest and incarceration for low-income and marginalized people. Public defenders have long been overworked and under-resourced. However, these issues have been compounded by increases in the volume and complexity of data in modern criminal cases. We explore the technology needs of public defenders through a series of semi-structured interviews with public defenders and those who work with them. We find that public defenders' ability to reason about novel surveillance data is woefully inadequate not only due to a lack of resources and knowledge, but also due to the structure of the criminal justice system, which gives prosecutors and police (in partnership with private companies) more control over the type of information used in criminal cases than defense attorneys. We find that public defenders may be able to create fairer situations for their clients with better tools for data interpretation and access. Therefore, we call on technologists to attend to the needs of public defenders and the people they represent when designing systems that collect data about people. Our findings illuminate constraints that technologists and privacy advocates should consider as they pursue solutions. In particular, our work complicates notions of individual privacy as the only value in protecting users' rights, and demonstrates the importance of data interpretation alongside data visibility. As data sources become more complex, control over the data cannot be separated from access to the experts and technology to make sense of that data. The growing surveillance data ecosystem may systematically oppress not only those who are most closely observed, but groups of people whose communities and advocates have been deprived of the storytelling power over their information.more » « less
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Introduction Social media has created opportunities for children to gather social support online (Blackwell et al., 2016; Gonzales, 2017; Jackson, Bailey, & Foucault Welles, 2018; Khasawneh, Rogers, Bertrand, Madathil, & Gramopadhye, 2019; Ponathil, Agnisarman, Khasawneh, Narasimha, & Madathil, 2017). However, social media also has the potential to expose children and adolescents to undesirable behaviors. Research showed that social media can be used to harass, discriminate (Fritz & Gonzales, 2018), dox (Wood, Rose, & Thompson, 2018), and socially disenfranchise children (Page, Wisniewski, Knijnenburg, & Namara, 2018). Other research proposes that social media use might be correlated to the significant increase in suicide rates and depressive symptoms among children and adolescents in the past ten years (Mitchell, Wells, Priebe, & Ybarra, 2014). Evidence based research suggests that suicidal and unwanted behaviors can be promulgated through social contagion effects, which model, normalize, and reinforce self-harming behavior (Hilton, 2017). These harmful behaviors and social contagion effects may occur more frequently through repetitive exposure and modelling via social media, especially when such content goes “viral” (Hilton, 2017). One example of viral self-harming behavior that has generated significant media attention is the Blue Whale Challenge (BWC). The hearsay about this challenge is that individuals at all ages are persuaded to participate in self-harm and eventually kill themselves (Mukhra, Baryah, Krishan, & Kanchan, 2017). Research is needed specifically concerning BWC ethical concerns, the effects the game may have on teenagers, and potential governmental interventions. To address this gap in the literature, the current study uses qualitative and content analysis research techniques to illustrate the risk of self-harm and suicide contagion through the portrayal of BWC on YouTube and Twitter Posts. The purpose of this study is to analyze the portrayal of BWC on YouTube and Twitter in order to identify the themes that are presented on YouTube and Twitter posts that share and discuss BWC. In addition, we want to explore to what extent are YouTube videos compliant with safe and effective suicide messaging guidelines proposed by the Suicide Prevention Resource Center (SPRC). Method Two social media websites were used to gather the data: 60 videos and 1,112 comments from YouTube and 150 posts from Twitter. The common themes of the YouTube videos, comments on those videos, and the Twitter posts were identified using grounded, thematic content analysis on the collected data (Padgett, 2001). Three codebooks were built, one for each type of data. The data for each site were analyzed, and the common themes were identified. A deductive coding analysis was conducted on the YouTube videos based on the nine SPRC safe and effective messaging guidelines (Suicide Prevention Resource Center, 2006). The analysis explored the number of videos that violated these guidelines and which guidelines were violated the most. The inter-rater reliabilities between the coders ranged from 0.61 – 0.81 based on Cohen’s kappa. Then the coders conducted consensus coding. Results & Findings Three common themes were identified among all the posts in the three social media platforms included in this study. The first theme included posts where social media users were trying to raise awareness and warning parents about this dangerous phenomenon in order to reduce the risk of any potential participation in BWC. This was the most common theme in the videos and posts. Additionally, the posts claimed that there are more than 100 people who have played BWC worldwide and provided detailed description of what each individual did while playing the game. These videos also described the tasks and different names of the game. Only few videos provided recommendations to teenagers who might be playing or thinking of playing the game and fewer videos mentioned that the provided statistics were not confirmed by reliable sources. The second theme included posts of people that either criticized the teenagers who participated in BWC or made fun of them for a couple of reasons: they agreed with the purpose of BWC of “cleaning the society of people with mental issues,” or they misunderstood why teenagers participate in these kind of challenges, such as thinking they mainly participate due to peer pressure or to “show off”. The last theme we identified was that most of these users tend to speak in detail about someone who already participated in BWC. These videos and posts provided information about their demographics and interviews with their parents or acquaintances, who also provide more details about the participant’s personal life. The evaluation of the videos based on the SPRC safe messaging guidelines showed that 37% of the YouTube videos met fewer than 3 of the 9 safe messaging guidelines. Around 50% of them met only 4 to 6 of the guidelines, while the remaining 13% met 7 or more of the guidelines. Discussion This study is the first to systematically investigate the quality, portrayal, and reach of BWC on social media. Based on our findings from the emerging themes and the evaluation of the SPRC safe messaging guidelines we suggest that these videos could contribute to the spread of these deadly challenges (or suicide in general since the game might be a hoax) instead of raising awareness. Our suggestion is parallel with similar studies conducted on the portrait of suicide in traditional media (Fekete & Macsai, 1990; Fekete & Schmidtke, 1995). Most posts on social media romanticized people who have died by following this challenge, and younger vulnerable teens may see the victims as role models, leading them to end their lives in the same way (Fekete & Schmidtke, 1995). The videos presented statistics about the number of suicides believed to be related to this challenge in a way that made suicide seem common (Cialdini, 2003). In addition, the videos presented extensive personal information about the people who have died by suicide while playing the BWC. These videos also provided detailed descriptions of the final task, including pictures of self-harm, material that may encourage vulnerable teens to consider ending their lives and provide them with methods on how to do so (Fekete & Macsai, 1990). On the other hand, these videos both failed to emphasize prevention by highlighting effective treatments for mental health problems and failed to encourage teenagers with mental health problems to seek help and providing information on where to find it. YouTube and Twitter are capable of influencing a large number of teenagers (Khasawneh, Ponathil, Firat Ozkan, & Chalil Madathil, 2018; Pater & Mynatt, 2017). We suggest that it is urgent to monitor social media posts related to BWC and similar self-harm challenges (e.g., the Momo Challenge). Additionally, the SPRC should properly educate social media users, particularly those with more influence (e.g., celebrities) on elements that boost negative contagion effects. While the veracity of these challenges is doubted by some, posting about the challenges in unsafe manners can contribute to contagion regardless of the challlenges’ true nature.more » « less
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