Experiences of People with Visual Impairments in Accessing Online Information and Services: A Systematic Literature Review

The World Wide Web is the largest source of electronic information in the world. Over the years, rapid advances in the internet have made it less accessible thereby making it increasingly difficult for people with visual impairments to access online information and services. This paper systematically reviews previous research to identify challenges that people with visual impairments face, and the role of accessibility technologies and guidelines to support people with visual impairments in their access to online information and services. The findings discuss three categories emerged from the literature: inaccessible content for the visually impaired, improving website accessibility for the visually impaired, and accessibility technologies and their benefits and limitations for people with visual impairments. The findings further discuss the usability issues which are present in accessing online content, the different attempts that have been made to mitigate these problems, and the different guidelines and tools that can be adopted by web designers to make websites more accessible for the visually impaired. It also discusses the versatility and availability of various accessibility technologies. Although these technologies provide basic access to online information, they are greatly limited in their functionality. Therefore, it is up to the web designers to change their perceptions when designing websites. With the proper use of the guidelines, the capabilities of accessibility technologies can be accommodated in making information provided accessible to all users including those with visual impairments. The contributions of this research are that it offers a rigorous narrative review to summarise the state of knowledge on challenges that people with visual impairments face in accessing online information and services, the support and limitations of accessibility technologies in addressing some of these challenges. In addition, this study identifies gaps and areas that deserve more scrutiny in future research including digital exclusion issues among the visually impaired, explanation on the unwillingness of web designers to develop accessible websites, improvements to accessibility technologies to support increasingly visually complex websites, among others. Since the visually impaired are a diverse group with different degrees of impairments, needs and preferences, we encourage researchers to involve them in future studies. Available at: https://aisel.aisnet.org/pajais/vol11/iss2/3

Exploring Risks in Smart City Infrastructure Projects: Municipal Broadband Initiatives

In recent years, cities are under increasing pressure to transform education, health care, transportation, civic engagement, public safety as well as other government services to maintain their competitiveness and improve citizen’s quality of life. This transformation is known as “smart city” initiatives. Broadband network infrastructure is an important underlying infrastructure for smart city projects. This study investigates risks in municipal broadband projects led by local government. Our goal is to develop a middle range theory to explain risks and their interrelationships. We first used grounded theory to identify a set of risks from archival and interview data. Next, we used revealed causal mapping analysis to develop a model of risks and their linkages. Our results suggest five risk categories: socio-political risks, approval risks, financial risks, technical risks, and partnership and resource management risks. We also found that several risk categories are intertwined. In particular, socio-political risks have impacts on other risks. Therefore, risk management and risk mitigation strategies need to take a holistic view towards all risks and their interconnections instead of focusing on each type of risks in isolation

“You have no idea how much we love Casper” – Developing configurations of employees’ RPA implementation experiences

Robotic process automation (RPA) is gaining popularity in the industry and is leveraged to improve operational efficiency, quality of work, risk management, and compliance. Despite the increasing adoption of RPA in industry, academic research is lagging. In particular, despite the often drastic changes in employees’ work tasks and processes, there is a lack of research that explores how human employees experience the implementation of RPA. This is important to understand as their experiences affect their interaction with the technology and, ultimately, their adoption and use, which is crucial to realise the benefits of RPA. To address this research gap, we conducted a case study in a financial institution in New Zealand and interviewed 18 employees to develop configurations of employees’ RPA implementation experiences. Our findings may inform implementation and change management strategies but also line-managers to accommodate employees’ needs better and to leverage the potentials of true human-robot collaboration

The Bottom-up and Horizontal Spillovers of Quality of Life from Continued ICT Use: The Case of Community Technology Centers

The ability to access and create knowledge through the use of ICT is critical in the global information society. ICT use should enhance a process of social inclusion by enabling individuals to fully participate in society across a variety of domains related to health, education, recreation, and culture, among others. However, not everyone has access to ICTs. Recently, community technology centers have developed to be an appealing solution to promote social inclusion. Following the social inclusion framework, this research examines how continued ICT use improves quality of life (QoL) with particular emphasis on the extent of bottom-up spillover effects from domain QoL to overall QoL and horizontal spillover effects among various domain QoL. The context of our study is the Thai community technology centers supported by the Microsoft Unlimited Potential grants. The results suggest that (1) the bottom-up spillover and the horizontal spillover effects simultaneously contribute to the overall QoL, (2) the satisfaction from continued use of ICT contributes to domain QoL and domain QoL, particularly the family, self, and community domains, contributes to overall QoL, and (3) the horizontal spillover effects exhibit complex relationships that involve direct one-to-one spillover effects, domain interaction effects, and reciprocal spillover effects. The work, education, leisure, and community domains influence QoL in other domains. Implications for research and practice are discussed

The Integrated Self-Determination and Self-Efficacy Theories of ICT Training and Use: The Case of the Socio-Economically Disadvantaged

Basic ICT and Internet skills are becoming necessary for individuals to have meaningful engagement across various life domains. However, mastering basic ICT skills is not a trivial task especially for those socio-economically disadvantaged. This research develops an integrated self-determination and self- efficacy theories to examine the influence of self-determined motivation on ICT training outcomes and subsequent ICT acceptance with an emphasis on Internet skill development and usage. The context of the study is the Thai community technology centers supported by the Microsoft Unlimited Potential grants. The results suggest that individuals who have higher self-determined motivation to participate in ICT training programs are more likely to develop Internet computer self-efficacy, positive training satisfaction, and strong usage intention. In other words, attitudes towards ICT acceptance are shaped even before individuals enter training programs. Implications for research and practice are discussed

Factors Influencing Cryptocurrency Acceptance Among Individuals: A Systematic Literature Review

A cryptocurrency is a digital currency that acts as a medium of exchange. Although many people know about cryptocurrency, only a few are using it. The lack of wider adoption of cryptocurrency likely hampers its future growth. Existing cryptocurrency adoption studies are fragmented; therefore, it is important to analyse and synthesise existing studies on cryptocurrency adoption to develop a comprehensive understanding of factors influencing cryptocurrency adoption. This study conducted a systematic literature review of 26 journal and conference papers to identify factors influencing cryptocurrency adoption and organise them using a Push-Pull-Mooring (PPM) framework. The findings suggest three push, ten pull and five mooring factors affecting cryptocurrency adoption. The push factors influence people to move away from conventional money to cryptocurrencies, and the pull factors attract people to cryptocurrencies. We also identify some mooring factors that negatively affect the pull factors and adoption of cryptocurrency, while social and technological factors and security positively influence the pull factors. Our study contributes to IS research by providing a comprehensive overview of factors contributing to cryptocurrency adoption. Insights from this study will be beneficial for banks and exchanges to develop strategies to encourage people to use cryptocurrencies, for governments to establish policies and safeguards on cryptocurrency use, and for developers to improve features of cryptocurrency platforms

Exploring qualitative comparative analysis in IS Research

Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) has been proposed as a promising qualitative data analysis strategy to study complex problems. QCA provides multiple conjunctural causation that can address generalizability concerns associated with case study research within the IS and other social science disciplines. However, there are not many studies that offer guidelines on how to effectively apply this methodology to IS research. This paper outlines a set of methodological principles for using QCA. An illustrative example of case studies of collaborative networks is discussed to demonstrate the application of QCA

Is There a Global Digital Divide for Digital Wireless Phone Technologies?

This research examines digital wireless phone adoption among nations and regions that will help to provide a picture of the current global digital divide. The data are drawn from 43 countries. We present a new theoretical perspective for IS research: a regional contagion theory of technology diffusion. We examine the efficacy of the new theory using empirical regularities analysis, and a vector autoregression and variance decomposition approach to establish information about the strength of the regional contagion links between countries in digital wireless phone diffusion. We found that faster growth of digital wireless phones occurs when a country has: a more well-developed telecommunications infrastructure, more competition in the wireless market, lower wireless network access costs, and fewer wireless technology standards. We also obtained a reading on cross-national influence of wireless diffusion. The countries we studied fell into three regional contagion groups: high, medium and low. The Asia Pacific countries revealed a pattern of homogeneously high regional contagion links, while Western European countries were divided across the three groups. Our findings are supported by a descriptive analysis of diffusion patterns and mini-case assessments

Goodnight Alexa – Theorising interactions between people with visual impairments and digital voice assistants

Visually impaired individuals face various physical, digital, and social challenges. While specialised technologies such as screen readers can mitigate some of these challenges, they are associated with unresolved dilemmas including stigma. Digital voice assistants, which were not intentionally developed for people with visual impairments, have a large potential to offer desirable benefits without a negative stereotype. Yet, there is a lack of knowledge of how people with visual impairments perceive this technology, how they interact with it, for which tasks they use it and what are the respective outcomes. To address these questions, we conducted a qualitative study and interviewed 21 people with visual impairments who use digital voice assistants. Relying on a sociotechnical perspective and the concept of IS delegation, we identified six different roles of voice assistants that differ based on their agentic capabilities, their delegation mechanisms, the tasks they execute, and the associated instrumental or humanistic outcomes

When Harry, the human, met Sally, the software robot: Metaphorical sensemaking and sensegiving around an emergent digital technology

Robotic process automation (RPA) is often used in organisational digitalisation efforts to automate work processes. RPA, and the software robots at its heart, is an equivocal and contentious technology. Adopting the products of theorising approach, this study views metaphors as central sensemaking and sensegiving devices that shape the interpretation of RPA among stakeholders towards a preferred reality of ways of seeing and experiencing software robots. The empirical materials are drawn from research in three Australasian organisations that have implemented RPA. Grounding our analysis in the domains-interaction model, we identified three root metaphors: person, robot and tool, their constitutive conceptual metaphors, and intended use as heuristics devices. Our findings show that metaphor is a powerful device that employees rely on to make sense of their experiences with a new digital technology that can potentially shape their roles, work practices and job design. In addition, managers and automation team members intentionally leverage metaphors to shape others’ perceptions of a software robot’s capabilities and limitations, its implication for human work and its expanding benefits for organisations over time, among others. Metaphor as a precursor to more formal theory provides scholars with a vocabulary to understand disparate experiences with an emergent automation technology that can be further developed to generate a theory of seeing automation and working with automated agents