Hello! Researchers at the University of Victoria, Department of Computer Science are conducting research to design an interactive system to improve diagram accessibility for people with visual impairments.
If you meet the following criteria, we would love to hear and learn from you!
- Consider yourself to be blind, visually impaired, or partially sighted;
- Rely on the auditory channel, or auditory combined with other sensory channels to access information from a computer;
- Use screen readers, braille-based systems, self-created solutions or others to access digital information;
- Have an age of more than 18 years;
- Reside in Canada.
During the study, you will be asked to participate in a remote interview session on Zoom or on Microsoft Teams. This session will be centred around understanding the current experience of you accessing diagrams and diagrammatic information, and assessing the need for a technology solution that could improve the accessibility of diagrams.
Insights gained from interviews with you will help us explore approaches to broaden access to diagrammatic information for people who may be otherwise left out or limited from the types of information they can readily access due to the constraints of how current technologies are designed (i.e., high reliance on visual channels of access). The result of this study will help inform the design of future computational systems to address diagram accessibility issues for people with visual impairments. The interview session will last 1 hour and as a thank you for your time we will provide an Amazon gift card of $30 CAD.
This project is titled “Improving Diagram Accessibility for People with Visual impairments”, and the researcher conducting this study is Yichun Zhao, an MSc student in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Victoria. This study is taking place under the supervision of Dr. Miguel Nacenta and Dr. Sowmya Somanath. The University of Victoria research ethics number for this study is 21-0425.
If you have any questions or would like to participate in this study, please contact me directly via email at yichunzhao@uvic.ca. Thank you, Yichun Zhao
This study recruitment information is also available through this accessible link: https://chunthebear.github.io/diagram-accessibility-research/.