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Degrees of Freedom: Designing Information and Communication Technologies to Support Enhanced Agency for Blind and Partially Sighted Individuals Through Cross-Sensory Information Representation

Barter, David (2023) Degrees of Freedom: Designing Information and Communication Technologies to Support Enhanced Agency for Blind and Partially Sighted Individuals Through Cross-Sensory Information Representation. [MRP]

Item Type: MRP
Creators: Barter, David
Abstract:

A significant change in working and learning environments has taken place in recent years, since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. The core of this shift is a steadily greater reliance on information and communication technologies (ICTs) to mediate representations of information. For blind and partially sighted individuals (BPSIs), this has been a difficult transition that has carried many inclusive and accessible design challenges along with it. This study is concerned with the limitations and compromises on BPSIs’ agency when relying on ICTs for equitable access to information relative to their sighted peers, and how designers of ICTs could responsibly use design recommendations aimed at supporting equal agency for these users. Actively shaping ICTs to be highly cross-sensory, interactive and navigable without a reliance on vision would be a step towards equal agency for BPSIs and making ICTs more inclusive. A research process was conducted comprised of functional usability testing of conventional ICT platforms (i.e. Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meets), semi-structured interviews focused on narrative exploration of BPSIs’ lived experiences with ICT use in working and learning environments, and longitudinal co-design workshops aimed at collaboratively building, testing and iterating on low-fidelity prototype ICTs. Through these activities, a suite of relevant themes were found, including the effectiveness of interactive information foraging, filtering for relevance, using different granularities of information depending on context, and navigation of the diagrammatic representations of ICTs using sensory-grounded language. Preliminary design recommendations for inclusive design of ICTs were informed by these outcomes, such as ensuring large quantities of information are curated interactively, providing appropriate choice selection relative to relevance to users’ goals and intentions, and holding organizations accountable for representation of BPSIs in decisions relating to ICT service provision. These outcomes suggest a promising future area of design research may have been articulated via these concerns for accessibility, management, navigation, and sensory-grounded representation of information.

Date: 2023
Uncontrolled Keywords: Human-centered computing, Accessibility, Accessibility technologies, Human-computer interaction, Interaction techniques, Interaction devices, HCI design and evaluation methods, Inclusive design, information and communication technologies, blind and partially sighted individuals, diagrammatic representation, information foraging, agency, shared intentionality, virtual working environments, virtual learning environments
Divisions: Graduate Studies > Inclusive Design
Date Deposited: 08 May 2023 14:38
Last Modified: 08 May 2023 14:38
URI: https://openresearch.ocadu.ca/id/eprint/4110

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