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Free, publicly-accessible full text available April 25, 2026
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Blind and low vision people use visual description services (VDS) to gain visual interpretation and build access in a world that privileges sight. Despite their many benefits, VDS have many harmful privacy and security implications. As a result, researchers are suggesting, exploring, and building obfuscation systems that detect and obscure private or sensitive materials. However, as obfuscation depends largely on sight to interpret outcomes, it is unknown whether Blind and low vision people would find such approaches useful. Our work aims to center the perspectives and opinions of Blind and low vision people on the potential of obfuscation to address privacy concerns in VDS. By reporting on interviews with 20 Blind and low vision people who use VDS, our findings reveal that popular research trends in obfuscation fail to capture the needs of Blind and low vision people. While obfuscation might be helpful in gaining more control, tensions around obfuscation misrecognition and confirmation are prominent. We turn to the framework of interdependence to unpack and understand obfuscation in VDS, enabling us to complicate privacy concerns, uncover the labor of Blind and low vision people, and emphasize the importance of safeguards. We provide design directions to move the trajectory of obfuscation research forward.more » « less
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Negative attitudes shape experiences with stigmatized conditions such as dementia, from affecting social relationships to influencing willingness to adopt technology. Consequently, attitudinal change has been identified as one lever to improve life for people with stigmatized conditions. Though recognized as a scaleable approach, social media has not been studied in terms of how it should best be designed or deployed to target attitudes and understanding of dementia. Through a mixed methods design with 123 undergraduate college students, we study the effect of being exposed to dementia-related media, including content produced by people with dementia. We selected undergraduate college students as the target of our intervention, as they represent the next generation that will work and interact with individuals with dementia. Our analysis describes changes over the period of two weeks in attitudes and understanding of the condition. The shifts in understanding of dementia that we found in our qualitative analysis were not captured by the instrument we selected to assess understanding of dementia. While small improvements in positive and overall attitudes were seen across all interventions and the control, we observe a different pattern with negative attitudes, where transcriptions of content produced by people with dementia significantly reduced negative attitudes. The discussion presents implications for supporting people with dementia as content producers, doing so in ways that best affect attitudes and understanding by drawing on research on cues and interactive media, and supporting students in changing their perspectives towards people with dementia.more » « less
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