Interaction Strategies of Blind Web Users – A Qualitative Study

Blind and visually impaired (BVI) individuals face significant accessibility problems while interacting with the web. BVI individuals engage in non-visual interactions with the web using screen readers. Accessibility problems hinder user interactions and generate frustration. Current approaches to solve those problems are predominantly techno-centric and tend to improve the screen reading capabilities. They, however, overlook the role of BVI individual\u27s interaction strategies. We define the “interaction strategy” as a coordinated sequence of user interactions with online resources that is intended to achieve an interaction goal. Interaction strategy is a larger term which includes browsing as well as coping strategies used in web-interactions. We collect qualitative observations of five BVI users’ web-interactions. Using the inductive analysis, we produce a web-interaction strategy framework

Understanding the interaction strategies of blind health IT users: a qualitative study

Blind and visually impaired (BVI) individuals face significant accessibility and usability problems while interacting with web and mobile applications. Current approaches to resolve those problems are overly techno-centric and ignore the role of BVI users in determining the success or failure of an interaction. Using the “Theory of Affordances” as a theoretical lens, this research includes the users in the equation. This research argues that the interaction strategies of BVI users play a vital role in determining the success or failure of their web and mobile interactions. Extant Information Systems literature lacks a comprehensive understanding of the BVI users’ interaction strategies. Therefore, the purpose of this research was to produce a comprehensive understanding of the BVI web and mobile users’ interaction strategies, respective accessibility, and usability problems, and use that knowledge to resolve the identified problems. This research is situated in the context of BVI users’ personal health information management using web and mobile applications. The research adopts a novel semiethnographic, conversation-style qualitative data collection methodology. The research design is an observation study with BVI web and mobile users. The research produces the comprehensive understanding of the web and mobile interaction strategies of BVI participants, and the respective accessibility and usability problems. The identified Web interaction strategies are: *Use of screen-reader specific navigation functions, *Use of links list, *Use the up and down arrow keys, *Use the “table layer”, *Using arrow keys, *Use of the tab key, *Use of the screen-find function, *Hit the enter key, *Hit the spacebar, *Tab and shift + tab in succession, *Up and down arrow keys in succession, *Use screen-reader function such as insert + tab in JAWS, *Re-doing the component-level operation, *Restarting the browser and re-doing the entire task-flow, *Trial and error, The identified mobile interaction strategies are: *Sequential scanning, *Gambling scanning, *Direct-touch scanning, *Read character-by-character, *Read word-by-word, *Read line-by-line, *Skim through headings, *Flick left and flick right in succession, *Flick left and flick right in succession, *Use of handwriting, *Use of braille screen input, *Use of direct-touch typing, *Use the dictation feature, *Use of an external keyboard, *Use of standard typing, *Use of touch typing, *Re-doing the component-level operation, *Moving one step back and re-tracing the path, *Restarting the application and re-doing the entire task-flow, *Trial and error. The web interaction strategies are very similar to the mobile interaction strategies. The participants often develop multiple strategies to achieve their objectives and then choose to execute one or more of the strategies considering various contextual factors. The strategies can be broadly classified as exploration or exploitation. The strategies in the exploration category intend to gather the information about the interface. The strategies in the exploitation category intend to use the properties of the interface without exploring the interface. This research makes the following contributions: *Defines the construct “interaction strategy” as a coordinated sequence of user interactions with online resources that is intended to achieve an interaction goal. It allows us to study the entire interaction as a single unit. *Develops a semi-ethnographic, conversation-style qualitative data-collection methodology to study human technology interactions. It implements the methodology to study the BVI users’ web and mobile interactions using a screen-reader. * Develops the theoretical analysis methodology to identify the areas of improvement in human technology interactions. *Generates the design and interaction principles to resolve the identified accessibility and usability problems

Life in transit : travel narratives of the British governess

Life in Transit: Travel Narratives of the British Governess argues that on entering the profession of governessing, women embarked on a new, more mobile existence of travel and relocation on a local and global scale. At a time when gentlewomen rarely travelled far without a chaperone, governesses left home and travelled unaccompanied across counties, countries and even continents for the purpose of work. Some relocated to wealthy households in Britain, some toured with families on the Continent, and others voyaged out to the colonies to work for expatriates or members of the Eastern aristocracy. Previously, however, scholars have tended to consider the governess in light of her unusual social status between the middle and working class. Studies of this kind do much to highlight the complexity of the governess’s situation, but by developing new theoretical perspectives which focus on the governess’s mobility, this thesis demonstrates how the impact of travel is fundamental to this.Highlighting the interplay between the governess of fact and fiction, Life in Transit defines the ‘governess travel narrative’ as a literary strand present in the canonical novel, and a sub-genre of women’s travel writing. Beginning with a re-reading of the governess novel, it considers Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848) to explore the governess’s journey in England. Moving its focus across the Channel, it then examines how the semi-autobiographical governesses of Anna Brownell Jameson’s Diary of and Ennuyée (1826) and Brontë’s Villette (1853) experience life on the Continent. Crossing the border of fact and fiction into the genre of travel writing, the thesis considers the work of the lesser-known Emmeline Lott and Ellen Chennells, and examines governess travel narratives produced at the height of the British Empire. Finally, it analyses the journeys of Sarah Heckford and Anna Leonowens, who travelling in the 1870s and 80s, reached as far as South Africa and Siam, extending the scope of women’s travel and pushing the boundaries of the governess profession.In this way, Life in Transit re-reads the governess’s plight as both a physical and psychological journey in which she attempts to understand her place in the world. Incorporating theories of travel, space, translation and ‘things’ into a framework through which to examine her experience, it builds on Marxist and feminist approaches to the governess’s position. Allowing for further analysis of the governess’s unusual status, this approach shows how, from within the liminal space of her displacement, the governess experiences her life through spatial above social relations, and provides a unique voice in nineteenth-century Britain’s conception of self and world

Accidental cosmopolitanism: connectivity, insistence and cultural experience

Processes of globalisation are often associated with a burgeoning consciousness of interconnectedness and interdependence between people in the majority and minority worlds. Areas of everyday life, such as consumption and travel, are held to be increasingly informed by the realisation that micro-practices implicate the person in relation to global Others. It is argued that rhetorical ideas of global awareness - as well as the theoretical assumptions that underpin them - depend heavily on rationalist notions of an unfurling consciousness, and inadequately consider the ambivalences engendered by informational overload, non-linear processes and the unintended consequences of globally significant actions. Thus prevalent ideas of acting ethically in globalised societies are not based on considerations of how people may construct the ‘globe’ as a shifting, imagined and incoherent context. The thesis proposes a new understanding of the idea of imaginative geography to conceptualise the ways in which living in interdependence involves a constant tension between implication and understanding. This is exemplified by the ways in which contemporary tourism - for political, cultural and environmental reasons - has become an experience of accidental cosmopolitanism for many; the experience of becoming unavoidably aware of one’s interconnections in a context where leisure normally guarantees insulation from them. As a case study the thesis analyses the construction of the Caribbean as a particular type of touristic space embedded in western images of the non-modem paradise. Field work in St Lucia reveals a fine-grained picture of the ambiguous ways in which touristic images are mediated, re-accented or contested, and how fantasy spaces can never be insulated from wider socio-political dynamics. It concludes by examining the import of these theoretical innovations and the fieldwork observation for discussions of globalisation and non-formal education

India on the move: the palanquin, the elephant and the railway

This thesis examines how British travellers experienced the Indian climate and landscape in, from and through three vehicles: the palanquin, the elephant and the railway. Much historical study has approached Western experiences of tropical nature with what this thesis calls a 'sedentary perspective'; that is, by studying the individuals, the sites and the representational practices connected with observant travel. The most obvious aspect of such travel – the mobility of soldiers, merchants, administrators and tourists – has been comparatively neglected. Travel in India, rather than merely connecting events across the expanse of the journey, was a significant space of experience and the mode by which travellers encountered their surroundings. This thesis argues that specific mobilities engendered distinct relations between the perceiving subject and the environment perceived. Means of transport – the palanquin, elephant and railway – were also means of observation, shaping the experience of landscape, ideas of tropical nature and the traveller as subject

Spaces of Appearance: Writings on Contemporary Theatre and Performance

This thesis, a collection of previously published materials, reflects a plural and evolving engagement with theatre and performance over the past fifteen years or so: as researcher, writer, editor, teacher, practitioner, spectator. These have rarely been discreet categories for me, but rather different modalities of exploration and enquiry, interrelated spaces encouraging dynamic connectivities, flows and further questions. Section 1 offers critical accounts of the practices of four contemporary theatre directors: Jerzy Grotowski, Robert Wilson, Peter Brook and Ariane Mnouchkine. Section 2 draws on elements of contemporary philosophy and critical thinking to explore the mutable parameters of performance. lt proposes performative mappings of certain unpredictable, energetic events 'in proximity of performance', to borrow Matthew Goulish's phrase: contact, fire, animals, alterity, place. Section 3 contains examples of documentation of performance practices, including a thick description of a mise en scene of a major international theatre production, reflections on process, training and dramaturgy, a performance text with a framing dramaturgical statement, and personal perspectives on particular collaborations. The external Appendix comprises a recently published collection of edited and translated materials concerning five core collaborative projects realised by Ariane Mnouchkine and the Theatre du Soleil at their base in the Cartoucherie de Vincennes, Paris. The core concerns of this thesis include attempts to think through: • the working regimes, poetics and pedagogies of certain directors, usually in collaborative devising contexts within which the creative agency of performers is privileged; • the processes and micro-politics of collaboration, devising, and dramaturgical composition; the dramaturgical implications of trainings, narrative structures, spaces, mise en scene, and of images as multi-layered, dynamic 'fields'; • the predicament and agency of spectators in diverse performance contexts, and the ways in which spectatorial roles are posited or constructed by dramaturgies; • the imbrication of embodiment, movement and perception in performance, and the plurality of modes of perception; • the critical and political functions of theatre and theatre criticism as cultural/social practice and 'art of memory' (de Certeau), of dramaturgies as critical historiographies, and of theatre cultures (and identities) as plural, dynamic, and contested; • performance as concentrated space for inter-subjectivity and the flaring into appearance of the 'face-to-face' (Levinas); the possibility of ethical, 'response-able' encounter and exchange with another; identity as relational and in-process, alterity as productive event, the inter-personal as political; • the poetics and politics of what seems an unthinkable surplus (and constitutive 'outside') to the cognitive reach of many conventional frames and maps in theatre criticism and historiography; an exploration of acts of writing as performative propositions and provocations ('critical fictions') to think the event of meanings at/of the limits of knowledge and subjectivity. This partial listing of recurrent and evolving concerns within the thesis traces a trajectory in my evolution as a writer and thinker, a gradual displacement from the relatively 'solid ground' of theatre studies and theatre history towards more fluid and tentative articulations of the shifting 'lie of the land' in contemporary performance and philosophy. This trajectory reflects a growing fascination with present process, conditions, practices, perceptions 'in the middle', and ways of writing (about) performance as interactive and ephemeral event

Machine Vision: How Algorithms are Changing the Way We See the World

Humans have used technology to expand our limited vision for millennia, from the invention of the stone mirror 8,000 years ago to the latest developments in facial recognition and augmented reality. We imagine that technologies will allow us to see more, to see differently and even to see everything. But each of these new ways of seeing carries its own blind spots. In this illuminating book, Jill Walker Rettberg examines the long history of machine vision. Providing an overview of the historical and contemporary uses of machine vision, she unpacks how technologies such as smart surveillance cameras and TikTok filters are changing the way we see the world and one another. By analysing fictional and real-world examples, including art, video games and science fiction, the book shows how machine vision can have very different cultural impacts, fostering both sympathy and community as well as anxiety and fear. Combining ethnographic and critical media studies approaches alongside personal reflections, Machine Vision is an engaging and eye-opening read. It is suitable for students and scholars of digital media studies, science and technology studies, visual studies, digital art and science fiction, as well as for general readers interested in the impact of new technologies on society.publishedVersio