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Collaborative writing tools have been used widely in professional and academic organizations for many years. Yet, there has not been much work to improve screen reader access in mainstream collaborative writing tools. This severely affects the way people with vision impairments collaborate in ability-diverse teams. As a step toward addressing this issue, the present article aims at improving screen reader representation of collaborative features such as comments and track changes (i.e., suggested edits). Building on our formative interviews with 20 academics and professionals with vision impairments, we developed auditory representations that indicate comments and edits using non-speech audio (e.g., earcons, tone overlay), multiple text-to-speech voices, and contextual presentation techniques. We then performed a systematic evaluation study with 48 screen reader users that indicated that non-speech audio, changing voices, and contextual presentation can potentially improve writers’ collaboration awareness. We discuss implications of these results for the design of accessible collaborative systems.
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Understanding Audio Production Practices of People with Vision Impairments
The advent of digital audio workstations and other digital audio tools has brought a critical shift in the audio industry by empowering amateur and professional audio content creators with the necessary means to produce high quality audio content. Yet, we know little about the accessibility of widely used audio production tools for people with vision impairments. Through interviews with 18 audio professionals and hobbyists with vision impairments, we find that accessible audio production involves: piecing together accessible and efficient workflows through a combination of mainstream and custom tools; achieving professional competency through a steep learning curve in which domain knowledge and accessibility are inseparable; and facilitating learning and creating access by engaging in online communities of visually impaired audio enthusiasts. We discuss the deep entanglement between accessibility and professional competency and conclude with design considerations to inform future development of accessible audio production tools.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1901456
- PAR ID:
- 10280640
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ASSETS '20: The 22nd International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1-13
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3373625.3416993
