Affiliation:
1. Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois
Abstract
This article explores the design and development of voice interfaces via traditional telephones as a way of supporting asynchronous online communication for older adults. E-mail is the primary form of online communication for older adults. However, e-mail communication currently requires access to and the ability to use an Internet-connected computer or device, which may be problematic due to barriers of physical access, expense, insufficient computer skill, or other accessibility issues. To address this, the present work leverages the pervasive hardware of traditional phones and familiar nonvisual models of phone-based interaction to create a new e-mail interface for older adults. We examine the potential of e-mail interaction via traditional phones through long-term field observations, prototype testing, and a four-week field-based user study. Our findings indicate that a simple voice e-mail interface accessed through traditional phones is usable for older adults and is a useful way for offline older adults to interact with an e-mail account. The ease of use and convenience of a phone-based interface are important given the “work” of keeping in touch over e-mail, and this approach has the potential to open up new avenues of online access for older adults who are still offline or who have late-life disabilities that make using traditional graphical e-mail systems difficult. This project contributes new insights regarding the ways in which voice interfaces can support asynchronous online communication for older adults and provides design guidance for the development of subsequent voice interfaces.
Funder
National Science Foundation
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Subject
Computer Science Applications,Human-Computer Interaction
Cited by
24 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献
1. Examining Voice Community Use;ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction;2024-02-05
2. Understanding voice‐based information uncertainty: A case study of health information seeking with voice assistants;Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology;2023-12-05
3. Enhancing Email Accessibility for Visually Impaired Individuals;Journal of Computers, Mechanical and Management;2023-09-30
4. Envisioning Equitable Speech Technologies for Black Older Adults;2023 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency;2023-06-12
5. Exploring Tangible User Interface Design for Social Connection Among Older Adults: A Preliminary Review;Extended Abstracts of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems;2023-04-19