Design Space and Evaluation Challenges of Adaptive Graphical User Interfaces

Engineering and Applied Science

Pedestrian Detection with Wearable Cameras for the Blind: A Two-way Perspective

Blind people have limited access to information about their surroundings, which is important for ensuring one's safety, managing social interactions, and identifying approaching pedestrians. With advances in computer vision, wearable cameras can provide equitable access to such information. However, the always-on nature of these assistive technologies poses privacy concerns for parties that may get recorded. We explore this tension from both perspectives, those of sighted passersby and blind users, taking into account camera visibility, in-person versus remote experience, and extracted visual information. We conduct two studies: an online survey with MTurkers (N=206) and an in-person experience study between pairs of blind (N=10) and sighted (N=40) participants, where blind participants wear a working prototype for pedestrian detection and pass by sighted participants. Our results suggest that both of the perspectives of users and bystanders and the several factors mentioned above need to be carefully considered to mitigate potential social tensions.Comment: The 2020 ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2020

Understanding Visual Arts Experiences of Blind People

Visual arts play an important role in cultural life and provide access to social heritage and self-enrichment, but most visual arts are inaccessible to blind people. Researchers have explored different ways to enhance blind people’s access to visual arts (e.g., audio descriptions, tactile graphics). However, how blind people adopt these methods remains unknown. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 15 blind visual arts patrons to understand how they engage with visual artwork and the factors that influence their adoption of visual arts access methods. We further examined interview insights in a follow-up survey (N=220). We present: 1) current practices and challenges of accessing visual artwork in-person and online (e.g., Zoom tour), 2) motivation and cognition of perceiving visual arts (e.g., imagination), and 3) implications for designing visual arts access methods. Overall, our findings provide a roadmap for technology-based support for blind people’s visual arts experiences. Skip Supplemental Material Sectio

Latent Phrase Matching for Dysarthric Speech

Many consumer speech recognition systems are not tuned for people with speech disabilities, resulting in poor recognition and user experience, especially for severe speech differences. Recent studies have emphasized interest in personalized speech models from people with atypical speech patterns. We propose a query-by-example-based personalized phrase recognition system that is trained using small amounts of speech, is language agnostic, does not assume a traditional pronunciation lexicon, and generalizes well across speech difference severities. On an internal dataset collected from 32 people with dysarthria, this approach works regardless of severity and shows a 60% improvement in recall relative to a commercial speech recognition system. On the public EasyCall dataset of dysarthric speech, our approach improves accuracy by 30.5%. Performance degrades as the number of phrases increases, but consistently outperforms ASR systems when trained with 50 unique phrases

Supporting feature awareness and improving performance with personalized graphical user interfaces

Personalized graphical user interfaces have the potential to reduce visual complexity and improve efficiency by modifying the interface to better suit an individual user's needs. Working in a personalized interface can make users faster, more accurate and more satisfied; in practice, however, personalization also comes with costs, such as a reliance on user effort to control the personalization, or the introduction of spatial instability when interface items are reorganized automatically. We conducted a series of studies to examine both the costs and benefits of personalization, and to identify techniques and contexts that would be the most likely to provide an overall benefit. We first interviewed long-term users of a software application that provides adaptable (user-controlled) personalization. A design trade-off that emerged is that while personalization can increase the accessibility of features useful to a user's current task, it may in turn negatively impact the user's awareness of the full set of available features. To assess this potential trade-off, we introduced awareness as an evaluation metric to be used alongside more standard performance measures and we ran a series of three studies to understand how awareness relates to core task performance. These studies used two different measures to assess awareness, showing that personalization can impact both the recognition rate of unused features in the interface and user performance on new tasks requiring those features. We investigated both adaptive (system-controlled) and adaptable personalization techniques to help us understand the generalizability of the awareness concept. In addition to introducing and incorporating awareness into our evaluations, we studied how specific contextual and design characteristics impact the user's experience with adaptive interfaces. In one study, we evaluated the impact of screen size on performance and user satisfaction with adaptive split menus. Results showed that the performance and satisfaction benefits of spatially reorganizing items in the interface are more likely to outweigh the costs when screen size is small. We also introduced a new adaptive personalization technique that maintains spatial stability, called ephemeral adaptation, and evaluated it through two studies. Ephemeral adaptation improves performance over both another closely related adaptive technique and a traditional interface.Science, Faculty ofComputer Science, Department ofGraduat