Designing to Support and Extend the Competencies of People with Visual Impairments

Reyes Cruz, Gisela

Abstract

This work sits in the fields of Human Computer Interaction and accessibility research dedicated to the study and development of technology used by people who are blind or visually impaired. Increasingly, researchers have stated the need to get away from technological solutions that intend to g€normalize' disabled individuals, towards providing alternative ways that accommodate diverse bodies and minds. To achieve this, scholars and activists call for a shift in the design paradigm in which both the designers' orientation and the design processes centre not only the needs of people with disabilities but also their lived experience and tacit knowledge. Moreover, more mainstream technologies must be built to accommodate them to the best extent possible, instead of leaving the responsibility to specialised assistive technologies. My PhD has been focused on uncovering and highlighting the competencies that people with visual impairments employ in their technology practices and how these are showcased, by closely examining a corpus of ethnographic data, including a comprehensive set of video demonstrations. Furthermore, my research aims to explore how these findings can be used for practical design within and beyond the accessibility and assistive technology fields, resulting in the production of resources that aid the design for supporting and extending such competencies.

Citation

Reyes Cruz, G. (2021). Designing to Support and Extend the Competencies of People with Visual Impairments. In CHI EA '21: Extended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. https://doi.org/10.1145/3411763.3443425

• Conference Name: CHI '21: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
• Conference Location: Yokohama, Japan
• Start Date: May 8, 2021
• End Date: May 13, 2021
• Acceptance Date: May 8, 2021
• Online Publication Date: May 8, 2021
• Publication Date: 2021-05
• Deposit Date: Apr 16, 2024
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
• Book Title: CHI EA '21: Extended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
• ISBN: 9781450380959
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3411763.3443425
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/33828544
• Publisher URL: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3411763.3443425
• Additional Information: Article No.: 68