point at which the user has implemented an alternative means of continuing the task. This alternative includes other methods of task completion, receiving outside help, or choosing to discontinue the task entirely. We are interested in the reasons for breakdowns and in the adaptive strategies, or workarounds, that are developed to carry out necessary tasks. “New design can be created and implemented only in the space that emerges in the recurrent structure of breakdown.” 21 By focusing on the point at which a blind user detours from the designer’s intended interaction, we begin to understand what motivates each workaround. We thus focus our data collection and analysis on the kinds of workarounds a nonsighted person adopts in carrying out everyday tasks and their implications for design.

Assistive technology. General guidelines exist for providing universal access to computing technology. One of the most influential is the W3C’s Web Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 1.0, 23 which includes “Provide equivalent alternatives to auditory and visual content” and “Ensure user control of time-sensitive content changes.” They sensitize designers to the fact that people interacting with their Web sites might not all have the same physical and cognitive abilities. Still, universal guidelines can easily obscure differences between people with different abilities, providing little guidance for designing for different interactional needs. For example, the guideline “Don’t rely on color alone” from WCAG 1.0 is of little use in designing Web sites for people with total blindness.

Research focused on people with visual impairments has yielded a number of guidelines tailored more specifically to this population, such as “Non-speech sounds should be used to provide information and feedback about commands or events rather than verbal message” 16 and “[provide] multimodal feedback as a means of improving task performance, especially for individuals with visual impairments.” 10 By employing a more ethnographically centered approach, we expand on previous studies, building on and complementing that research. Doing so, we hope to further understand how a blind user’s experience

our interviews
concerned not
only usability
but also aesthetics,
affect, meaning,
historical
associations of
use in context,
and envisioning of
future technologies.

and social context in addition to physical limitations affect the use of technology. Moreover, by more narrowly focusing on a computer user among the 0.03% of people in the U.S. with congenital blindness5 (as opposed to, say, someone from among the 3.33% of the U.S. population with age-related macular degeneration10, 19), we hoped to develop insights more specific to this smaller population. This is consistent with Newell and Gregor’s concern17 that “…except for a very limited range of products, ‘design for all’ is a very difficult, if not often impossible task” since “[p]roviding access to people with certain types of disability can make the product significantly more difficult to use by people without disabilities, and often impossible to use by people with a different type of disability.”

We focused on someone with congenital blindness for two reasons: The first was personal, since the first author has a close friend with congenital blindness, and the project was inspired by informal discussion and interaction with this friend. The second was our belief that working with someone who had never had even residual sight would help highlight our taken-for-granted knowledge as researchers. Moggridge15 captures this perspective when he wrote, “When we want to learn about people, it is important to include some who represent critical extreme values of the relevant characteristics, to avoid the trap of designing only for the average.” 15 We undertook this research as sighted “outsiders,” not as members of a blind community. In this regard, our perspective in relation to the research subject is much like that in a contextual inquiry, 3 where the design researcher seeks to understand the situated work practices in a particular setting through observation and discussion during the performance of the practices in situ.

method

This case study of a congenitally blind college student, Sara (name changed to maintain confidentiality) took place in six sessions of approximately two hours each over a four-week time period in February and March 2006. The first author conducted all interviews, which were tape-recorded during each meet-