CHS: Small: User Interfaces for Improving Collaboration Between Blind and Sighted People

难以使用的图形用户界面阻碍了盲人和视障人士参与工作、教育和公共生活的其他方面。其他用户界面技术，如屏幕阅读器软件可以通过将无法访问的视觉内容转换为合成语音来解决这个问题，但在共享环境中使用时可能会引入其他问题；当视力正常的人使用图形用户界面时，盲人用户无法跟上，而大多数视力正常的用户缺乏使用屏幕阅读器的培训。这种差距使得盲人和视力正常的同伴很难在共享任务上进行协作，因为每个用户对任务的看法可能截然不同，并且可能难以跟随他们的伙伴的行动。PI在这项研究中的目标是了解不同视觉能力的用户之间协作的障碍，并创建和评估促进这种协作的新工具。使盲人和视力正常的人能够协同工作，将大大改善数百万人的教育和就业成果。PI将与合作伙伴AccessComputing Alliance和Colorado Center for The Blind合作，直接将残障人士纳入研究团队，并将发布一个开源工具包，用于创建支持盲人/视力正常者协作的软件。教育活动将包括与盲人和视力正常的学生一起举办的暑期工作坊，以探索具有不同能力的学生如何学习共同设计和共同开发更易于访问的软件。之前很少有研究探讨盲人和正常人如何使用电脑进行同步协作。PI的初步工作已经确定了盲人和正常人之间使用现有工具进行同步协作的几个重大障碍：在没有视觉反馈的情况下保持共同注意力，缺乏对他人所采取行动的意识，以及屏幕阅读器的语音输出与活动伙伴之间的带外对话之间的串扰。在这个项目中，PI将开发和测试一组度量标准和参考任务，用于评估使用图形用户界面的视力正常的合作伙伴和使用屏幕阅读器的盲人合作伙伴之间的协作活动。PI将开发工具，通过与小组分享每个用户的活动信息，支持平等和有效的盲人/视力正常的协作。这种方法将通过网络连接用户的计算设备（以及相关的辅助技术），以便每个用户在与共享资源交互时能够保持对其合作伙伴活动的感知。PI将对将这些信息集成到现有用户界面中的各种方法进行原型化，并实现一个工具包，使软件开发人员能够在其应用程序中支持盲/视协作。PI将通过盲人和视力用户混合组的用户测试来验证这些工具，并将通过将其应用于同步协同协作、异步在线协作和使用人群工作者的微任务来演示该方法的健壮性。

Inaccessible graphical user interfaces hinder participation by blind and visually impaired people in work, education, and other aspects of public life. Alternative user interface technology such as screen reader software can address this problem by converting inaccessible visual content into synthesized speech, but can introduce other issues when used in a shared setting; blind users are unable to follow along when their sighted partners use a graphical user interface, while most sighted users lack the training to use a screen reader. This gap makes it difficult for blind and sighted peers to collaborate on shared tasks, as each user may have a significantly different view of the task and may have difficulty following their partner's actions. The PI's goals in this research are to understand the barriers to collaboration between users of different visual abilities, and to create and evaluate new tools to facilitate such collaborations. Enabling blind and sighted people to work collaboratively will significantly improve educational and employment outcomes for millions of people. The PI will work with partners, the AccessComputing Alliance and the Colorado Center for the Blind, to directly involve individuals with disabilities as part of the research team, and will release an open source toolkit for creating software to support blind/sighted collaboration. Educational activities will include summer workshops with blind and sighted students to explore how students with mixed abilities can learn to co-design and co-develop more accessible software together.Little prior research has explored how blind and sighted people collaborate synchronously using computers. The PI's preliminary work has identified several significant obstacles to synchronous collaboration between blind and sighted individuals using existing tools: maintaining joint attention without visual feedback, lack of awareness of actions taken by others, and crosstalk between a screen reader's speech output and out-of-band conversations between activity partners. In this project, the PI will develop and test a set of metrics and reference tasks for evaluating collaborative activities between a sighted partner using a graphical user interface and a blind partner using a screen reader. The PI will develop tools to support equal and effective blind/sighted collaboration through sharing information about each user's activities with the group. This approach will connect users' computing devices (and related assistive technology) over a network, so that each user can maintain awareness of their partner's activities when interacting with shared resources. The PI will prototype various means of integrating this information into existing user interfaces, and implement a toolkit which enables software developers to support blind/sighted collaboration in their applications. The PI will validate these tools through user testing with mixed groups of blind and sighted users, and will demonstrate the robustness of the approach by applying it to synchronous co-located collaboration, asynchronous online collaboration, and micro-tasking using crowd workers.