New Approaches to Investigate Disability in HCI
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New Approaches to Investigate Disability in HCI Gisela Reyes-Cruz Abstract University of Nottingham Recent research on accessibility and assistive Nottingham, UK technology within Human Computer Interaction (HCI) [email protected] has been applying concepts and perspectives brought from Critical Disability Studies, helping in turn, to Joel Fischer transform how research and design involving people University of Nottingham with disabilities is conducted. Such research has Nottingham, UK inspired and informed our recent work on reframing [email protected] disability as competency [14], from an ethnographic Stuart Reeves study investigating technology use by people with University of Nottingham visual impairments, that we revisit in this paper. Nottingham, UK However, herein we focus our attention on [email protected] demonstrations conducted and propose them as a potential methodological approach that could contribute to reimagining current understandings of (dis)ability and help to uncover the routine and mundane accommodation work that is involved in getting by in everyday life. Author Keywords Disability; Visual Impairments; Ethnomethodology; Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for Demonstrations personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights CSS Concepts for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other •Human-centered computing ~Accessibility uses, contact the owner/author(s). ~Accessibility theory, concepts and paradigms Submitted to CHI 2020 workshop “Nothing About Us Without Us: Investigating the Role of Critical Disability Studies in HCI”. Introduction Almost ten years ago, Mankoff et. al. [11] examined and reflected how the field of disability studies had influenced their work on assistive technology. By emphasis on situated competencies as the “capability of revisiting two of their research projects, they argued managing one’s everyday affairs without interference” that critical inquiry through the lens of disability studies [6]. Sidebar 1. Transcription notation led them to redefine research problems they had not • P: Participant foreseen and to consider new approaches to conduct We suggest that approaches seeking to investigate • VO: VoiceOver research and design involving individuals with interactional mundanity in disability and people’s seen- • I: Investigator disabilities. but-unnoticed or taken-for-granted competencies, • Double parentheses enclose could lead to new directions in HCI research. In our actions. Different approaches from the social sciences, such as observational research, this has turned on members • Colon (:) indicates extensions critical disability studies [12] and feminist disability demonstrating their competencies as a core feature. of sounds or syllables. studies [7] have been recently applied into the HCI But what is the interactional work of demonstrating • Square bracket ([) indicates field, bringing new discussions within and beyond technology by people with visual impairments and what overlapping utterances or accessibility and assistive technology research. Such is its methodological significance? We address this next. actions. efforts have critiqued the role that has been • Utterances enclosed between traditionally assigned to people with disabilities in Demonstrations as a Method to Investigate ‘greater than’ signs (>) were research and design, i.e. passive recipients of Competencies deliver at a quicker pace than technological interventions. It has also challenged There is difficulty in obtaining naturalistic accounts of surrounding talk. common practices that leave such people out of participants’ experiences and is a common issue arising • Hash (#) indicates VoiceOver relevant decision-making. There have been critical when conducting ethnographic fieldwork. Research has sound effect. discussions that seek to reimagine empathy [2], also sought to address the cost, intrusiveness and • Blank spaces between independence [1] and power dynamics [19] notions impracticality of observing real-world activities, such as parentheses indicate regarding disability. Participatory research involving self-report diaries [15] or probes [8]. unintelligible utterances. individuals with disabilities has also been a topic widely • A single dash (-) is used when discussed [20] and similarly there has been a growing Our prior ethnographic study [14] with visually the utterance is cut off. interest in applying co-design approaches [4,13]. impaired people emerged from immersion in charity Lastly, there has also been research aiming to uncover group meetings, individual interviews and observational the invisible and ongoing work produced by people with sessions. We asked participants to demonstrate the and without disabilities to build access [3]. activities they regularly perform and their common tools and devices. This resulted in the first author Our own recent work [14] has also aimed to expand recording audio-visual data exhibiting technology use current understandings of disability within HCI. Here we by participants, including a range of devices such as want to make some remarks on our portable magnifiers and mobile phones, taking place at ethnomethodological approach [5], which we employed participants’ homes or the charity offices. to investigate technology use by people with visual impairments and in turn, reframe disability in terms of Demonstrations are typically part of case studies when competencies. We draw on ethnomethodology’s a controlled user study is inappropriate or impractical, or when the research scope is broad, precluding the VoiceOver reads aloud the elements she is interacting use of controlled research [10]. As our first foray into with (“Words”, “Speaking rate”) and status (“90%...”). the fields of accessibility and visual impairments, the As VoiceOver reads the percentages, its pace slows Sidebar 2. Exemplar of ethnographic study was purposely exploratory. down. VoiceOver stops ‘talking’ after the participant accommodation work Demonstrations had an open structure, without pre- taps the screen with two fingers. It is then that she 1 ((P is holding phone with both defined tasks, which consequently allowed participants accounts for what she has just done (“I just put the hands)) to provide naturalistic accounts of how they would speed down”, line 15). ordinarily use the technology. What we can immediately note about this fragment is Ongoing analysis of the data drawing on the critical role of what we might call accommodation ethnomethodology and conversation analysis [6,16] work. In this case, the participant is working to unpacks the interactional work of demonstrating. To accommodate for the investigator, slowing the 2 P: So:: ((presses the volume-up illustrate this, we revisit an example from our paper VoiceOver speed down so as to render it intelligible for button three times)) where a blind participant shows the investigator how a non-expert (i.e., the investigator, who does not use she uses her mobile phone and the screen reader VoiceOver). Of course, the broader phenomenon of (VoiceOver) built in it. This is an accessibility feature ‘accommodation work’ is a routine part of everyday life that reads aloud the elements tapped or selected on for people with disabilities, and frequently negatively the screen. The data fragment we want to examine sits so, as accommodation work must often be performed at the beginning of the mobile phone demonstration so to ‘get on’ in everyday life—experiences that are after the participant gave a quick summary of the sometimes described as structural disadvantages. 3 P: On the:: the first page I have activities regularly performed with the device and the ((holds two fingers over screen)) apps commonly used. In the fragment (see sidebars 2- However, we observe that demonstrations can serve to 3) we use specific conventions for transcribing the perhaps more helpfully unpack accommodation work by sequential organisation of talking [9] (see sidebar 1). 1) making visible the competencies people have developed to accomplish routine or mundane In the fragment the participant initiates the interactions, 2) reflect on the inter-relation between demonstration by holding the phone with both hands. participants, their environment and other people. 4 P: ((taps first app on the top left of In order to proceed, she quickly stages this with a brief the screen using middle finger)) preparation involving increasing the volume. She then In doing (1) and (2) above, demonstrations can open goes to the apps on the home screen while producing up various possibilities for understanding. They can an account of this action (“on the first page I have”, surface various initiation and preparation work that line 3), quickly then tapping the top left of the screen leads to the intended content of the demonstration (i.e. to trigger the VoiceOver. VoiceOver—which has been showing apps on a phone). They can help pick out set to a fast utterance pace—then (rapidly) reads aloud mundane ‘troubles’ encountered by the participant(s) the element selected; the participant then repeats it. and how they are resolved. And they can also throw 5 VO: # <Messages ( )> Next she engages with a series of gestures while into relief various interactional features of 6 P: Messages accommodation work and its interpersonal We