Kristen Shinohara

Rochester Institute of Technology | RIT · Department of Information Sciences & Technologies (IST)

Teaching accessibility is essential in training technologists and designers. However, the topics of accessibility and disability are vast and intersect with culture (social constructions). Since cultural background is an influential factor in design decisions, which could have implications for accessible design, we wanted to understand whether and...

Based on a virtual reality (VR) sound visualization indicator system named “SoundVizVR” proposed and evaluated in a previous research, we developed a “SoundVizVR Plugin” for the Unity platform which enabled developers to adopt the SoundVizVR system in their VR applications and games. In this study, we worked with two VR game developers to explore t...

Despite increasing work investigating the accessibility of research tools, most accessibility research has traditionally focused on popular, mainstream, or web technologies. We investigated barriers and workarounds blind and low vision doctoral students in computing-intensive disciplines experienced and engaged, respectively, when using advanced te...

Many digital systems are found to be inaccessible and a large part of the issue is that accessibility is not considered early enough in the design process. Digital prototyping tools are a powerful resource for designers to quickly explore both low and high fidelity design mockups during initial stages of product design and development. We evaluated...

Digital accessibility has become an important topic in the field of HCI, but when looking at accessibility on a global scale, we find that the representation of accessibility research is mostly centered in the Global North with countries that are WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic). Our paper explores digital accessibili...

Website builders enable individuals without design or technical skills to create websites. However, it is unclear if modern websites created by website builders meet accessibility standards. We reviewed six popular website building platforms and found a lack of accessibility support. Wix provided the most comprehensive accessibility documentation a...

In interaction or user-centered design practices, it is common to employ interviews and think-aloud techniques to gather data about user behavior. These techniques enable researchers to learn about how users think and use technologies during the design and user testing process. However, such techniques involve accessing audio feedback, which may re...

Listening to podcasts is a popular way for people to spend their time. However, little focus has been given to how accessible pod-cast platforms are for Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (DHH) people. We present a DHH-centered accessible podcast platform prototype developed with user-centered design. Our proposed design was constructed through semi-structur...

Few students with disabilities transition from undergraduate to graduate programs. Graduate students often receive ineffective and insufficient accommodations, including lack of support specific to graduate students, because disability services policies are shaped by undergraduate experiences. To understand how disability services offices accommoda...

Accessibility is a core component of good interaction design. However, we have not yet reached a point in the field of HCI where we can say that this is standard practice. In this provocation, we challenge the HCI community to reconcile accessibility as an additional, ad-hoc specialization and instead to reflect on how our practices and tools may p...

Since prior work has identified that cultural differences influence user design preferences and interaction methods, as well as emphasizing the need to reflect on the appropriateness of popular HCI principles, we believe that it is equally important to apply this inquiry to digital accessibility and how accessibility fits within the design process...

High-fidelity prototyping tools are used by software designers and developers to iron out interface details without full implementation. However, the lack of visual accessibility in these tools creates a barrier for designers who may use screen readers, such as those who are vision impaired. We assessed conformance of four prototyping tools (Sketch...

Despite efforts to support students with disabilities in higher education, few continue to pursue doctoral degrees in computing. We conducted an interview study with 12 blind and low vision, and 7 deaf and hard of hearing current and former doctoral students in computing to understand how graduate students adjust to inaccessibility and ineffective...

We investigate the degree to which undergraduate computing students in a United States university consider accessibility several years after instruction. Prior work has found that cultural and ethical norms become ingrained early in STEM professionals’ careers; so, we focus on students approaching graduation and after an internship experience, who...

Electronic textiles, or e-textiles, are an emerging type of wearable and interactive technology that can gather information either actively (i.e. pressing a button) or passively (i.e. pulse rate), or act purely as an output (e.g. LEDs). Developing e-textile technology requires some familiarity with many different concepts, one of which is circuit d...

The ASSETS conference is a leading HCI venue committed to making computing accessible for people with disabilities. Increasingly, the venue itself has become more accessible as the ASSETS community strives for improvement. For example, the conference provides ASL interpreters and live captioning, and the ASSETS community strongly emphasizes the imp...

This article is an extended version of our 2018 ASSETS paper entitled, “Incorporating Social Factors in Accessible Design.” In our ASSETS paper, we demonstrated the viability of the Design for Social Accessibility perspective through a series of user-centered workshops with professional designers. With this expanded article, we conducted a follow-u...

Smart textiles, a subset of wearable technologies, inspire novel human-interactions that leverage people's physical and cognitive actions. However, people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) have different communication, social, and sensory experiences than non-disabled people. We empirically investigate how adults with IDD deter...

Personal technologies are rarely designed to be accessible to disabled people, partly due to the perceived challenge of including disability in design. Through design workshops, we addressed this challenge by infusing user-centered design activities with Design for Social Accessibility-a perspective emphasizing social aspects of accessibility-to in...

Despite years of addressing disability in technology design and advocating user-centered design practices, popular mainstream technologies remain largely inaccessible for people with disabilities. We conducted a design course study investigating how student designers regard disability and explored how designing for multiple disabled and nondisabled...

Industry demand for software developers with knowledge of accessibility has increased substantially in recent years. However, there is little knowledge about the prevalence of higher education teaching about accessibility or faculty's perceived barriers to teaching accessibility. To address this gap, we surveyed 14,176 computing and information sci...

Despite practices addressing disability in design and advocating user-centered design (UCD) approaches, popular mainstream technologies remain largely inaccessible for people with disabilities. We conducted a design course study investigating how student designers regard disability and explored how designing for both disabled and non-disabled users...

Although a critical step in the technology design process, ideation is often not accessible for people with disabilities. We present findings from a design workshop facilitated to brainstorm accessible ideation methods. Groups, mostly engineers, ideated on a design challenge and documented access barriers encountered by participants with disabiliti...

With the recent influx of smartphones, tablets, and wearables such as watches and glasses, personal interactive device use is increasingly visible and commonplace in public and social spaces. Assistive Technologies (ATs) used by people with disabilities are observable to others and, as a result, can affect how AT users are perceived. This raises th...

While assistive technology focuses on providing function to help people with disabilities overcome barriers to access, awkward and clunky designs often draw unwanted attention to the user. In this way, assistive technologies are not always designed with social situations in mind, and may contribute to issues of in-access, particularly in social sit...

Fitts' law (1954) characterizes pointing speed-accuracy performance as throughput, whose invariance to target distances (A) and sizes (W) is known. However, it is unknown whether throughput and Fitts' law models in general are invariant to task dimensionality (1-D vs. 2-D), whether univariate (SDx) or bivariate (SDx,y) endpoint deviation is used, w...

Recently, Wobbrock et al. (2008) derived a predictive model of pointing accuracy to complement Fitts' law's predictive model of pointing speed. However, their model was based on one-dimensional (1-D) horizontal movement, while applications of such a model require two dimensions (2-D). In this paper, the pointing error model is investigated for 2-D...

Few research studies focus on how the use of assistive technologies is affected by social interaction among people. We present an interview study of 20 individuals to determine how assistive technology use is affected by social and professional contexts and interactions. We found that specific assistive devices sometimes marked their users as havin...

Computer users with motor impairments face major challenges with conventional mouse pointing. These challenges are mostly due to fine pointing corrections at the final stages of target acquisition. To reduce the need for correction-phase pointing and to lessen the effects of small target size on acquisition difficulty, we introduce four enhanced ar...

People with disabilities use assistive devices both to bridge accessibility gaps in everyday tasks, and to augment inaccessible technologies, such as desktop computers. This interview study investigates how people with disabilities are affected when using assistive devices in professional and social situations. Participants were asked about differe...

Meaning can be as important as usability in the design of technology.

Prior work has shown that goal crossing may be a more accessible interaction technique than conventional pointing-and-clicking for motor-impaired users. Although goal crossing with pen-based input devices has been studied, pen-based designs have limited applicability on the desktop because the pen can "fly in," cross, and "fly out," whereas a persi...

While software is increasingly being improved to enhance access and use, software interfaces nonetheless often create barriers for people who are blind. In response, the blind computer user develops workarounds, strategies to overcome the constraints of a physical and social world engineered for the sighted. This paper describes an interview and ob...

This project reports on an observational and interview study of a non-sighted person to develop design insights for enhancing interactions between a blind person and everyday technological artifacts found in their home such as wristwatches, cell phones or software applications. Analyzing situations where work-arounds compensate for task failures re...

This project explores alternative design ideas for enhancing interactions between a person who is blind and everyday technological artifacts, such as wristwatches or cell phones. While many technological and household artifacts are constantly improved to enhance user experience, user interfaces usually create informational barriers for blind users....