Kristen Shinohara

(My first hci.social post!)

Our paper on the accessibility of tools used for advanced research was recently presented at #CSCW2022 and is available on the ACM Digital Library https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3555609 @MurtazaTamjeed

Usability, Accessibility and Social Entanglements in Advanced Tool Use by Vision Impaired Graduate Students | Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction

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 ...

Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
Nov 18, 2022 at 6:24pmWeb
Show threadKristen ShinoharaNov 18, 2022
We investigated the accessibility of advanced tools for research as used by blind and low vision computing scholars. We found tools used for computing-related research, such as R, LaTeX, or Cygwin, were not accessible to study participants without additional accommodation.
Show threadKristen ShinoharaNov 18, 2022

Further, workarounds invited additional challenges, such as decreasing the overall usability of a research task when ad-hoc tools were used, or requiring human coordination, assistance, or collaboration.

This work documents additional labor involved in the effort to use tools for advanced research tasks and shows that usability and human assistance may be complicated by inaccessible technologies used in high-level research.