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Observing Sara: a case study of a blind person's interactions with technology

Published: 15 October 2007 Publication History

Abstract

While software is increasingly being improved to enhance access and use, software interfaces nonetheless often create barriers for people who are blind. In response, the blind computer user develops workarounds, strategies to overcome the constraints of a physical and social world engineered for the sighted. This paper describes an interview and observational study of a blind college student interacting with various technologies within her home. Structured around Blythe, Monk and Park's Technology Biographies, these experience centered sessions focus not only on technology function, but on the relationship of function to the meanings and values that this student attributes to technology use in different settings. Studying a single user across a range of devices and tasks provides a broader and more nuanced understanding of the contexts and causes of task failure and of the workarounds employed than is possible with a more narrowly focused usability study. Themes that were revealed across a range of tasks include the importance for technologies to not "mark" the user as being blind within a predominantly sighted social world, to support user independence through portability and user control, and to allow user "resets" and brute-force fallbacks in the face of persistent task failure.

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cover image ACM Conferences
Assets '07: Proceedings of the 9th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility
October 2007
282 pages
ISBN:9781595935731
DOI:10.1145/1296843
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for 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 for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 15 October 2007

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Author Tags

  1. assistive technology
  2. technology biographies
  3. user-centered inclusive design

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