This paper investigates the tools and practices used by Orientation and Mobility (O&M) specialists in instructing people who are blind or have low vision in concepts, skills, and techniques for safe and independent travel. Based on interviews with experienced instructors who practice in different O&M settings we find that a shortage of qualified specialists and restrictions on in-person activities during COVID-19 has accelerated interest in remote instruction and assessment, while widespread adoption of smartphones with accessibility support has driven interest in assistive apps. This presents both opportunities and challenges for a practice that is traditionally conducted in-person and assessed through qualitative observations. In response we identify multiple opportunities for HCI research in service of O&M, including: supporting a 'physician's assistant' model of remote O&M instruction and assessment, matching O&M instructors' clients with guide dogs, highlighting clients' progress towards O&M goals, and collaboratively planning routes and monitoring clients' independent travel progress.
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Clew3D: Automated Generation of O&M Instructions Using LIDAR-Equipped Smartphones
Certified orientation and mobility specialists (COMS) work with clients who are blind or visually impaired (BVI) to help them travel independently with confidence. Part of this process involves creating a narrative description of a route and using specific techniques to help the client internalize it. We focus on the problem of automatically generating a narrative description of an indoor route based on a recording from a smartphone. These automatically generated narrations could be used in cases where a COMS is not available or to enable clients to independently practice routes that were originally learned with the help of a COMS. Specifically, we introduce Clew3D, a mobile app that leverages LIDAR-equipped iOS devices to identify orientation and mobility (O&M) landmarks and their relative location along a recorded route. The identified landmarks are then used to provide a spoken narration modeled after traditional O&M techniques. Our solution is co-designed with COMS and uses methods and language that they employ when creating route narrations for their clients. In addition to presenting Clew3D, we report the results of an analysis conducted with COMS regarding techniques and terminology used in traditional, in-person O&M instruction. We also discuss challenges posed by vision-based systems to achieve automatic narrations that are reliable. Finally, we provide an example of an automatically generated route description and compare it with the same route provided by a COMS.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2007824
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10358206
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ASSETS '21: The 23rd International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 3
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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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. 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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3441852.3476564
