Conveying Situational Information to People with Visual Impairments
This work addresses privacy management challenges for people with visual impairments in everyday environments, representing an incremental improvement in assistive technology design.
The study tackled the problem of conveying situational information to people with visual impairments by developing and testing three prototypes (tactile, haptic, and audio) to provide privacy-related feedback, resulting in usability insights from 14 participants on practical issues like information speed and design considerations such as configurable privacy bubbles.
Knowing who is in one's vicinity is key to managing privacy in everyday environments, but is challenging for people with visual impairments. Wearable cameras and other sensors may be able to detect such information, but how should this complex visually-derived information be conveyed in a way that is discreet, intuitive, and unobtrusive? Motivated by previous studies on the specific information that visually impaired people would like to have about their surroundings, we created three medium-fidelity prototypes: 1) a 3D printed model of a watch to convey tactile information; 2) a smartwatch app for haptic feedback; and 3) a smartphone app for audio feedback. A usability study with 14 participants with visual impairments identified a range of practical issues (e.g., speed of conveying information) and design considerations (e.g., configurable privacy bubble) for conveying privacy feedback in real-world contexts.