CAREER: Advancing Computing for Parents with Vision Impairments

超过2500万患有视力障碍的美国成年人长期以来无法充分参与生活中一些最重要的角色：父母、配偶、邻居等等。虽然无障碍计算的创新从根本上提高了这些人的独立性，但相互依赖和使用的更大社会背景往往被忽视。例如，光学字符识别、视觉人群工作和文本转语音技术使个人能够为盲人打印文本，但当盲人父母想要与他们的视力正常的孩子共同阅读时，他们的目标不仅仅是访问；他们希望通过用自己的声音阅读，以及通过提高自己和孩子的盲文和印刷识字技能的方式，与孩子建立联系。该项目将提供三种新的基于语音的技术，这些技术将自由传播，以产生广泛的影响。它将维持加州大学欧文分校（University of California, Irvine）和戴尔·麦金托什残疾人中心（Dayle McIntosh Center for the Disabled）之间正在进行的社区合作，教授未来的软件工程师如何创造无障碍技术，并为大洛杉矶地区的视力受损人群提供视力帮助。它还将支持在STEM领域代表性不足的残疾人的职业发展。越来越多的无障碍计算学者认为，该领域缺乏对视力受损的成年人所扮演的“照顾”角色的基本理解，哪些交互模型是有效的，以及存在哪些无障碍挑战。因此，技术往往不能支持这个社区成员的独立性，因为它们不能实现充分的社会融合。本研究的双重研究目标通过确定新的应用领域和交互技术来解决这一差距。该项目将对用户生成的数据进行内容分析，并结合访谈数据来回答上述问题。然后，以设计为基础的研究将探讨哪些新的互动模式可以应用于语音助手，以促进亲子关系，父母的盲文读写能力，以及视障父母与视力正常的孩子共同阅读时孩子的文字读写能力。项目成果将包括由目标社区成员生成的大规模数据集，未开发应用领域的分类和对用户需求的定性洞察，以及语音助手的新型交互模型，所有这些将结合起来构成可访问计算中新兴子领域的基础，该领域专注于相互依赖的技术。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Over 25 million American adults with vision impairments have long been unable to participate fully in some of the most important roles in life: parent, spouse, neighbor, and more. While innovations in accessible computing have radically advanced the independence of these people, the larger social contexts of interdependence and use are often neglected. For example, optical character recognition, visual crowd work, and text-to-speech technologies enable individual access to print text for the blind, but when a blind parent wants to co-read with their sighted child their goals go beyond mere access; they want to bond with their child by reading in their own voice and in ways that enhance Braille and print literacy skills for both themself and their child. This project will contribute three novel voice-based technologies that will be freely disseminated so as to have broad impact. It will sustain an ongoing community collaboration between the University of California, Irvine and the Dayle McIntosh Center for the Disabled, to teach future software engineers how to create accessible technologies and provide sighted assistance to the visually impaired population in the greater Los Angeles area. And it will support the careers of people with disabilities, who are underrepresented in STEM.A growing number of accessible computing scholars argue that the field lacks a fundamental understanding of what "caring for" roles adults with vision impairments occupy, what interaction models are effective, and what accessibility challenges exist. As a result, technologies often fall short of supporting independence for the members of this community in that they do not enable full social integration. The dual research aims of this research address this gap by identifying both novel application domains and interaction techniques. The project will conduct a content analysis of user-generated data coupled with interview data to answer the questions posed above. Design-based research will then address what novel interaction models can be applied to voice assistants to facilitate parent-child bonding, parent Braille literacy, and child print literacy as a visually impaired parent co-reads with their sighted child. Project outcomes will include a large-scale dataset generated by members of the target community, a taxonomy of untapped application domains and qualitative insights into user needs, as well as novel interaction models for voice assistants, all of which will combine to constitute the foundations for a nascent sub-field in accessible computing that focuses on technologies for interdependence.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.