Search for: All records

A growing body of evidence suggests Voice Assistants (VAs) are highly valued by people with vision impairments (PWVI) and much less so by sighted users. Yet, many are deployed in homes where both PWVI and sighted family members reside. Researchers have yet to study whether VA use and perceived benefits are affected in settings where one person has a visual impairment and others do not. We conducted six in-depth interviews with partners to understand patterns of domestic VA use in mixed-visual-ability families. Although PWVI were more motivated to acquire VAs, used them more frequently, and learned more proactively about their features, partners with vision identified similar benefits and disadvantages of having VAs in their home. We found that the universal usability of VAs both equalizes experience across abilities and presents complex tradeoffs for families-regarding interpersonal relationships, domestic labor, and physical safety-which are weighed against accessibility benefits for PWVI and complicate the decision to fully integrate VAs in the home. 

Co-reading (when parents read aloud with their children) is an important literacy development activity for children. HCI has begun to explore how technology might support children in co-reading, but little empirical work examines how parents currently co-read, and no work examines how people with visual impairments (PWVI) co-read. PWVIs' perspectives offer unique insights into co-reading, as PWVI often read differently from their children, and (Braille) literacy holds particular cultural significance for PWVI. We observed discussions of co-reading practices in a blind parenting forum on Facebook, to establish a grounded understanding of how and why PWVI co-read. We found that PWVIs' co-reading practices were highly diverse and affected by a variety of socio-technical concerns - and visual ability was less influential than other factors like ability to read Braille, presence of social supports, and children's literacy. Our findings show that PWVI have valuable insights into co-reading, which could help technologies in this space better meet the needs of parents and children, with and without disabilities. 

Workplace environments are characterized by frequent interruptions that can lead to stress. However, measures of stress due to interruptions are typically obtained through self-reports, which can be affected by memory and emotional biases. In this paper, we use a thermal imaging system to obtain objective measures of stress and investigate personality differences in contexts of high and low interruptions. Since a major source of workplace interruptions is email, we studied 63 participants while multitasking in a controlled office environment with two different email contexts: managing email in batch mode or with frequent interruptions. We discovered that people who score high in Neuroticism are significantly more stressed in batching environments than those low in Neuroticism. People who are more stressed finish emails faster. Last, using Linguistic Inquiry Word Count on the email text, we find that higher stressed people in multitasking environments use more anger in their emails. These findings help to disambiguate prior conflicting results on email batching and stress.