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"Is Someone There? Do They Have a Gun": How Visual Information about Others Can Improve Personal Safety Management for Blind Individuals

Authors:

Stacy M. Branham,

Ali Abdolrahmani,

William Easley,

Morgan Scheuerman,

Erick Ronquillo,

Amy HurstAuthors Info & Claims

ASSETS '17: Proceedings of the 19th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility

Pages 260 - 269

https://doi.org/10.1145/3132525.3132534

Published: 19 October 2017 Publication History

Abstract

For decades, researchers have investigated and developed technologies that support independent navigation for people who are blind. This has led to systems that primarily aid in detecting routes, landmarks, and building features. However, there has been relatively little inquiry regarding how technologies might support navigation around and in the presence of other people. What visual information, if any, do blind navigators wish they had about people on their path? To address this question, we surveyed 58 blind and low vision individuals and interviewed 10 blind individuals. We discovered our participants were interested in using visual information about others to increase their physical safety. For example, they wanted to know if a passerby was holding a weapon, if a presumed official had a proper uniform or badge, and how to describe visual aspects of a criminal to law enforcement. This paper presents one of the only reports documenting accessibility challenges related to physical safety posed by others, including how future assistive tools can empower individuals with disabilities to more actively increase their sense of safety. We call this emerging area Personal Safety Management and contribute a set of four broad subareas that deserve further exploration by researchers and designers working within the blind and broader disabilities communities.

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Cited By

Kamikubo RKacorri HAsakawa C(2024)"We are at the mercy of others' opinion": Supporting Blind People in Recreational Window Shopping with AI-infused TechnologyProceedings of the 21st International Web for All Conference10.1145/3677846.3677860(45-58)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3677846.3677860
Marsh AMilne L(2024)I Don’t Want to Sound Rude, but It’s None of Their Business: Exploring Security and Privacy Concerns around Assistive Technology Use in Educational SettingsACM Transactions on Accessible Computing10.1145/367069017:2(1-30)Online publication date: 5-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3670690
Kameswaran VRobinson JSambasivan NAggarwal GMorris M(2024)Help and The Social Construction of Access: A Case-Study from IndiaProceedings of the 26th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility10.1145/3663548.3675606(1-12)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3663548.3675606
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

"Is Someone There? Do They Have a Gun": How Visual Information about Others Can Improve Personal Safety Management for Blind Individuals
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Accessibility
    1. Empirical studies in accessibility
  2. Ubiquitous and mobile computing
2. Social and professional topics
  1. User characteristics
    1. People with disabilities

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Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

ASSETS '17: Proceedings of the 19th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility

October 2017

450 pages

ISBN:9781450349260

DOI:10.1145/3132525

General Chair:
Amy Hurst
University of Maryland, Baltimore County, USA
,
Program Chairs:
Leah Findlater
University of Washington, USA
,
Meredith Ringel Morris
Microsoft Research, USA

Copyright © 2017 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

SIGACCESS: ACM Special Interest Group on Accessible Computing

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 19 October 2017

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TEMA (Toyota Engineering and Manufacturing North America)

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ASSETS '17

Sponsor:

SIGACCESS

ASSETS '17: The 19th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility

October 20 - November 1, 2017

Maryland, Baltimore, USA

Acceptance Rates

ASSETS '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 28 of 126 submissions, 22%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 436 of 1,556 submissions, 28%

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Cited By

Kamikubo RKacorri HAsakawa C(2024)"We are at the mercy of others' opinion": Supporting Blind People in Recreational Window Shopping with AI-infused TechnologyProceedings of the 21st International Web for All Conference10.1145/3677846.3677860(45-58)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3677846.3677860
Marsh AMilne L(2024)I Don’t Want to Sound Rude, but It’s None of Their Business: Exploring Security and Privacy Concerns around Assistive Technology Use in Educational SettingsACM Transactions on Accessible Computing10.1145/367069017:2(1-30)Online publication date: 5-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3670690
Kameswaran VRobinson JSambasivan NAggarwal GMorris M(2024)Help and The Social Construction of Access: A Case-Study from IndiaProceedings of the 26th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility10.1145/3663548.3675606(1-12)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3663548.3675606
Teng YCourtien CRios DTseng YGibson JAziz MReyna AVaish RSmith B(2024)Help Supporters: Exploring the Design Space of Assistive Technologies to Support Face-to-Face Help Between Blind and Sighted StrangersProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642816(1-24)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613904.3642816
Duan LChen YQu ZMcGrath MEhmke EGorlatova M(2024)BiGuide: A Bi-level Data Acquisition Guidance for Object Detection on Mobile Devices2024 23rd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN)10.1109/IPSN61024.2024.00012(88-100)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/IPSN61024.2024.00012
Kuriakose BShrestha RSandnes F(2023)Exploring the User Experience of an AI-based Smartphone Navigation Assistant for People with Visual ImpairmentsProceedings of the 15th Biannual Conference of the Italian SIGCHI Chapter10.1145/3605390.3605421(1-8)Online publication date: 20-Sep-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3605390.3605421
Stangl ASadjo EEmami-Naeini PWang YGurari DFindlater L(2023)“Dump it, Destroy it, Send it to Data Heaven”: Blind People’s Expectations for Visual Privacy in Visual Assistance TechnologiesProceedings of the 20th International Web for All Conference10.1145/3587281.3587296(134-147)Online publication date: 30-Apr-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3587281.3587296
Karimi PBrady EMartin-Hammond ABolchini D(2023)“I stepped into a puddle”: Non-Visual Texting in Nomadic ContextsProceedings of the 20th International Web for All Conference10.1145/3587281.3587285(32-43)Online publication date: 30-Apr-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3587281.3587285
Oion MProkriti AHoque SAkter SAra SShazid MMahmud M(2023)A Machine Learning Based Image to Object Detection and Audio Description for Blind People2023 26th International Conference on Computer and Information Technology (ICCIT)10.1109/ICCIT60459.2023.10441089(1-6)Online publication date: 13-Dec-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCIT60459.2023.10441089
Castle CGreasley ABurland K(2022)The Musical Experiences of Adults with Severe Sight Impairment: An Interpretative Phenomenological AnalysisMusic & Science10.1177/205920432210832965Online publication date: 1-Mar-2022
https://doi.org/10.1177/20592043221083296
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