descriptions, or braille for augmenting visual information take time to listen to or read and process mentally, and can feel cumbersome. Often, people with VI are also less familiar with the use of common technology-prototyping toolkits such as Arduino and related software-development environments.

As a result, there is a tendency for people with VI to be less engaged or involved in the technology-creation process, and for other researchers to take a more active role in “doing the design.” Shinohara et al. [ 5] demonstrate the importance of people with VI being closely involved in the practice of design, drawing particular attention to the ways in which technology develops through designers’ engagement with materials in real time and how this process assists them in thinking through and adjusting their design. This design thinking involves not only reflection on functional uses but also an examination of how the technology would manifest itself within a person’s broader social and emotional life. These iterations, which are often informed by tacit knowledge, can crucially shape a technology. This foregrounds the question of how we can bring people with VI more strongly into technology development and research processes as designers and design partners. How can they become the creative agents and play a more active role in contributing their ideas and perspectives to such processes?

We offer two vignettes from our
fieldwork to exemplify how to elevate
people with disabilities as creative
agents. During co-design with sighted
and VI students, researchers capitalized
on opportunities when sighted students
were fascinated with a VI student’s
nonvisual technique. During one session
they prompted a VI student to teach
their sighted peers how they echolocate
or learn the spatial layout of a room
by listening to how sounds made with
their tongue reverberate from their
surroundings [ 1]. This unique skill
positioned the VI student as not just a
recipient of AT but also a creative agent
with skills important for its design.

The student’s auditory and spatial navigation inspired opportunities for richer, multimodal designs. Our research shows that when not explicitly attended to, traditional hierarchies of ability and design expertise take over; sighted students will design for VI students and poorly communicate what they are doing. Instead, people who traditionally have more power in design sessions should intentionally seek opportunities to background their expertise in favor of less understood abilities like echolocating for experiencing the world and prototyping designs. During some activities, such as group assignments, it may not always be possible for teachers to actively promote all students’ abilities. Other techniques could include turn taking, such that one student is reliant on their partner to complete a task before both can proceed, as can be found with recent inclusive learning tools such as Torino that deliberately foster collaboration [ 3].

Discussing this topic at the
workshop, we identified that for
people with VI to become technology
designers themselves, computing
sciences and design practices need
to be more accessible. The anecdote
above demonstrates that accessibility
does not always mean augmenting
existing design activities. Sometimes,
as in the case of incorporating
echolocation into design, they will
have to be reimagined. We illustrate
this further with another story:
During a co-design session,
Oussama Metatla and colleagues
wanted to make brainstorming
accessible for VI participants. Since
sticky notes are a popular medium for
sharing ideas, they made audio sticky
notes by combining foam paper with
electronic tags and audio tag readers
familiar to the participants. This did
not work. Participants attempted to
use the material provided to create
audio sticky notes, but as discussions
unfolded, they drifted away from
these materials and focused on
verbal exchange instead. Despite
being “accessible,” the process of
constructing these audio sticky notes
hindered rather than encouraged
communication among participants
and designers.

A possible explanation for this hindrance is the clash between the transient nature of audio as a display modality and the persistent spatial organization of the sticky-notes method of brainstorming and prototyping. Thus, while the design material itself was made “accessible,” it lacked the emergent properties, spontaneity, and illuminating qualities that it could have when shared among sighted co-designers. That is, the audio sticky notes no longer functioned as an effective shared artifact in this particular case, creating an asymmetry between the contributions of the sighted designers— who could not only see an overview of the physical organization of the artifacts but also actively assist with their construction—and those of the non-sighted participants. In this sense, the shift away from the physical and auditory artifacts to the verbal

 

Flipchart paper with different brainstorm notes that were discussed during the workshop centered around: design methods, interaction, and evaluation.