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Like many parents, visually impaired parents (VIPs) read books with their children. However, research on accessible reading technologies predominantly focuses on blind adults reading alone or sighted adults reading with blind children, such that the motivations, strategies, and needs of blind parents reading with their sighted children are still largely undocumented. To address this gap, we interviewed 13 VIPs with young children. We found that VIPs (1) sought familial intimacy through reading with their child, often prioritizing intimacy over their own access needs, (2) took on many types of access labor to read with their children, and (3) desired novel assistive technologies (ATs) for reading that prioritize intimacy while reducing access labor. We contribute the notion of Intimate AT, along with a demonstrative design space, which together constitute a new design paradigm that draws attention to intimacy as a facet of both independently and collaboratively accessible ATs. 

Proximity labeling expansion microscopy (PL-ExM) visualizes superresolution structures of interactome on widely accessible light microscopes, enabling the assessment of the precision and efficiency of proximity labeling techniques. 

Co-reading, an activity where adults collaboratively read books with child(ren), is important for literacy learning and forming human connection. However, parents and guardians with visual impairments do not experience the same level of access to resources when co-reading with their child(ren) as their sighted counterparts, especially as regards images in children’s books. Through conducting an interview study with five visually impaired parents/guardians, we illuminate the importance parents place on images in children’s books, how they access visual information in children’s print books, and the potential of smart speakers in assisting their existing co-reading practices. 

In addition to diffusive signals, cells in tissue also communicate via long, thin cellular protrusions, such as airinemes in zebrafish. Before establishing communication, cellular protrusions must find their target cell. Here, we demonstrate that the shapes of airinemes in zebrafish are consistent with a finite persistent random walk model. The probability of contacting the target cell is maximized for a balance between ballistic search (straight) and diffusive search (highly curved, random). We find that the curvature of airinemes in zebrafish, extracted from live-cell microscopy, is approximately the same value as the optimum in the simple persistent random walk model. We also explore the ability of the target cell to infer direction of the airineme’s source, finding that there is a theoretical trade-off between search optimality and directional information. This provides a framework to characterize the shape, and performance objectives, of non-canonical cellular protrusions in general.