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BACKGROUND: Today, various emerging assistive applications (apps) running on smartphones have been introduced such as Seeing AI, TapTapSee, and BeMyEyes apps. The assistive apps are designed to assist people with visual impairment in navigating unfamiliar environments, reading text, identifying objects and persons. Yet, little is known about how those with visual impairment perceive the assistive apps. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to advance knowledge of user experience with those assistive apps. METHODS: To address the knowledge gap, this study conducted phone interviews with a convenience sample of 30 individuals with visual impairment. RESULTS: The results indicated that those with visual impairment showed a range of preferences, needs, and concerns about user interfaces and interactions with the assistive apps. DISCUSSIONS: Given their needs and concerns, this study offered a set of facilitators to promote user adoption of the assistive apps, which should be valuable guidance to user interface/interaction designers in the field.
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Digital Privacy of Assistive Technology Users with Visual Disabilities
As technology is advancing, accessibility is also taken care of seriously. Many users with visual disabilities take advantage of, for example, Microsoft's Seeing AI application (app) that is equipped with artificial intelligence. The app helps people with visual disabilities to recognize objects, people, texts, and many more via a smartphone's built-in camera. As users may use the app in recognizing personally identifiable information, user privacy should carefully be treated and considered as a top priority. Yet, little is known about the user privacy issues among users with visual disabilities, such that this study aims to address the knowledge gap by conducting a questionnaire with the Seeing AI users with visual disabilities. This study found that those with visual disabilities had a lack of knowledge about user privacy policies. It is recommended to offer an adequate educational training; thus, those with visual disabilities can be well informed of user privacy policies, ultimately leading to promoting safe online behavior to protect themselves from digital privacy and security problems.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1831969
- PAR ID:
- 10464584
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting
- Volume:
- 66
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2169-5067
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1105 to 1109
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1177/1071181322661363
