No Arabic abstract
Accessibility research has grown substantially in the past few decades, yet there has been no literature review of the field. To understand current and historical trends, we created and analyzed a dataset of accessibility papers appearing at CHI and ASSETS since ASSETS founding in 1994. We qualitatively coded areas of focus and methodological decisions for the past 10 years (2010-2019, N=506 papers), and analyzed paper counts and keywords over the full 26 years (N=836 papers). Our findings highlight areas that have received disproportionate attention and those that are underserved--for example, over 43% of papers in the past 10 years are on accessibility for blind and low vision people. We also capture common study characteristics, such as the roles of disabled and nondisabled participants as well as sample sizes (e.g., a median of 13 for participant groups with disabilities and older adults). We close by critically reflecting on gaps in the literature and offering guidance for future work in the field.
Numerous accessibility features have been developed and included in consumer operating systems to provide people with a variety of disabilities additional ways to access computing devices. Unfortunately, many users, especially older adults who are more likely to experience ability changes, are not aware of these features or do not know which combination to use. In this paper, we first quantify this problem via a survey with 100 participants, demonstrating that very few people are aware of built-in accessibility features on their phones. These observations led us to investigate accessibility recommendation as a way to increase awareness and adoption. We developed four prototype recommenders that span different accessibility categories, which we used to collect insights from 20 older adults. Our work demonstrates the need to increase awareness of existing accessibility features on mobile devices, and shows that automated recommendation could help people find beneficial accessibility features.
As cities continue to grow globally, air pollution is increasing at an alarming rate, causing a significant negative impact on public health. One way to affect the negative impact is to regulate the producers of such pollution through policy implementation and enforcement. CleanAirNowKC (CAN-KC) is an environmental justice organization based in Kansas City (KC), Kansas. As part of their organizational objectives, they have to date deployed nine PurpleAir air quality sensors in different locations about which the community has expressed concern. In this paper, we have implemented an interactive map that can help the community members to monitor air quality efficiently. The system also allows for reporting and tracking industrial emissions or toxic releases, which will further help identify major contributors to pollution. These resources can serve an important role as evidence that will assist in advocating for community-driven just policies to improve the air quality regulation in Kansas City.
There is growing effort in the physics of behavior that aims at complete quantitative characterization of animal movements under more complex, naturalistic conditions. One reaction to the resulting explosion of data is the search for low dimensional structure. Here I try to define more clearly what we mean by the dimensionality of behavior, where observable behavior may consist either of continuous trajectories or sequences of discrete states. This discussion also serves to isolate situations in which the dimensionality of behavior is effectively infinite. I conclude with some more general perspectives about the importance of quantitative phenomenology.
Social media platforms support the sharing of written text, video, and audio. All of these formats may be inaccessible to people who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH), particularly those who primarily communicate via sign language, people who we call Deaf signers. We study how Deaf signers engage with social platforms, focusing on how they share content and the barriers they face. We employ a mixed-methods approach involving seven in-depth interviews and a survey of a larger population (n = 60). We find that Deaf signers share the most in written English, despite their desire to share in sign language. We further identify key areas of difficulty in consuming content (e.g., lack of captions for spoken content in videos) and producing content (e.g., captioning signed videos, signing into a phone camera) on social media platforms. Our results both provide novel insights into social media use by Deaf signers and reinforce prior findings on DHH communication more generally, while revealing potential ways to make social media platforms more accessible to Deaf signers.
Accessibility research sits at the junction of several disciplines, drawing influence from HCI, disability studies, psychology, education, and more. To characterize the influences and extensions of accessibility research, we undertake a study of citation trends for accessibility and related HCI communities. We assess the diversity of venues and fields of study represented among the referenced and citing papers of 836 accessibility research papers from ASSETS and CHI, finding that though publications in computer science dominate these citation relationships, the relative proportion of citations from papers on psychology and medicine has grown over time. Though ASSETS is a more niche venue than CHI in terms of citational diversity, both conferences display standard levels of diversity among their incoming and outgoing citations when analyzed in the context of 53K papers from 13 accessibility and HCI conference venues.