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Creators/Authors contains: "Shinohara, Kristen"

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  4. Despite increasing work investigating the accessibility of research tools, most accessibility research has traditionally focused on popular, mainstream, or web technologies. We investigated barriers and workarounds blind and low vision doctoral students in computing-intensive disciplines experienced and engaged, respectively, when using advanced technical tools for research tasks. We conducted an observation and interview study with eight current and former Ph.D. students, closely analyzing the accessibility of specific tasks. Our findings contextualize how inaccessible tools complicate research tasks, adding time and effort, and exacerbating social entanglements in collaborative relationships. This work contributes empirical data that extricates how in/accessibility of advanced technical tools used in research influences productivity and collegial efforts. 
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  5. Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (DHH) users face accessibility challenges during in-person and remote meetings. While emerging use of applications incorporating automatic speech recognition (ASR) is promising, more user-interface and user-experience research is needed. While co-design methods could elucidate designs for such applications, COVID-19 has interrupted in-person research. This study describes a novel methodology for conducting online co-design workshops with 18 DHH and hearing participant pairs to investigate ASR-supported mobile and videoconferencing technologies along two design dimensions: Correcting errors in ASR output and implementing notification systems for influencing speaker behaviors. Our methodological findings include an analysis of communication modalities and strategies participants used, use of an online collaborative whiteboarding tool, and how participants reconciled differences in ideas. Finally, we present guidelines for researchers interested in online DHH co-design methodologies, enabling greater geographically diversity among study participants even beyond the current pandemic. 
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  6. Few students with disabilities transition from undergraduate to graduate programs. Graduate students often receive ineffective and insufficient accommodations, including lack of support specific to graduate students, because disability services policies are shaped by undergraduate experiences. To understand how disability services offices accommodate graduate students: we (1) critically analyzed disability services websites of 18 U.S. institutions, and (2) interviewed 17 disability services staff. Disability services websites publicly present institutional accommodation policies and guidelines, and staff are responsible for identifying, providing, and implementing reasonable accommodations. We found that policies may be interpreted differently depending on specific student circumstances. We discuss our findings in two main themes: (a) Policies and attitudes ascribed to disability, technology, and faculty, and (b) Impacts of policies and perspectives on accommodation decisions for graduate students. The contributions of this work include an empirical investigation of institutional support for disabled graduate students and suggestions for how to improve support from disability services offices to empower students. 
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  7. null (Ed.)
    Despite efforts to support students with disabilities in higher education, few continue to pursue doctoral degrees in computing. We conducted an interview study with 12 blind and low vision, and 7 deaf and hard of hearing current and former doctoral students in computing to understand how graduate students adjust to inaccessibility and ineffective accommodations. We asked participants how they worked around inaccessibility, managed ineffective accommodations, and advocated for tools and services. Employing a lens of ableism in our analysis, we found that participants’ extra effort to address accessibility gaps gave rise to a burden of survival, which they sustained to meet expectations of graduate-level productivity. We recommend equitable solutions that acknowledge taken-for-granted workarounds and that actively address inaccessibility in the graduate school context. 
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  8. null (Ed.)
    Increasingly, support for students with disabilities in post-secondary education has boosted enrollment and graduates rates. Yet, such successes are not translated to doctoral degrees. For example, in 2018, the National Science Foundation reported 3% of math and computer science doctorate recipients identified as having a visual limitation while 1.2% identified as having a hearing limitation. To better understand why few students with disabilities pursue PhDs in computing and related fields, we conducted an interview study with 19 current and former graduate students who identified as blind or low vision, or deaf or hard of hearing. We asked participants about challenges or barriers they encountered in graduate school. We asked about accommodations they received, or did not receive, and about different forms of support. We found that a wide range of inaccessibility issues in research, courses, and in managing accommodations impacted student progress. Contributions from this work include identifying two forms of access inequality that emerged: (1) access differential: the gap between the access that non/disabled students experience, and (2) inequitable access: the degree of inadequacy of existing accommodations to address inaccessibility. 
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