Anne Marie Piper

Kapil Garg, Xinru Tang, Jimin Heo et al.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly used by blind and low-vision (BLV) people to identify and understand products in their everyday lives, such as food, personal products, and household goods. Despite their prevalence, we lack an empirical understanding of how common image quality issues, like blur and misframing of items, affect the accuracy of VLM-generated captions and whether resulting captions meet BLV people's information needs. Grounded in a survey with 86 BLV people, we systematically evaluate how image quality issues affect captions generated by VLMs. We show that the best model recognizes products in images with no quality issues with 98% accuracy, but drops to 75% accuracy overall when quality issues are present, worsening considerably as issues compound. We discuss the need for model evaluations that center on disabled people's experiences throughout the process and offer concrete recommendations for HCI and ML researchers to make VLMs more reliable for BLV people.

Xinru Tang, Anne Marie Piper

As mixed-ability collaboration has become increasingly focal within accessibility research, managing varied, and sometimes conflicting, access needs has become a key consideration in designing for access. When an accessibility feature or practice benefits some people while constraining others, how should designers navigate these trade-offs? This paper responds to this question by analyzing how a mixed-ability nonprofit worked to make communication accessible to its members as it grew from a small blind-focused athletic group to a larger cross-disability organization. Based on a six-month study that combines interviews and field observations, we show that working with conflicting access needs is not just a technical 'problem' but a generative process that sparks reflection on technical constraints and preferences, diverse roles and communication norms, and organizational demands. We therefore argue for rethinking "conflicts" in access as key sites for revealing power structures and creating opportunities for accountability and repair.