Usability, Accessibility and Social Entanglements in Advanced Tool Use by Vision Impaired Graduate Students

Abstract

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 technical tools for research tasks. We conducted an observation and interview study with eight current and former Ph.D. students, closely analyzing the accessibility of specific tasks. Our findings contextualize how inaccessible tools complicate research tasks, adding time and effort, and exacerbating social entanglements in collaborative relationships. This work contributes empirical data that extricates how in/accessibility of advanced technical tools used in research influences productivity and collegial efforts.