Observing Sara: a case study of a blind person's interactions with technology

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 observational study of a blind college student interacting with various technologies within her home. Structured around Blythe, Monk and Park's Technology Biographies, these experience centered sessions focus not only on technology function, but on the relationship of function to the meanings and values that this student attributes to technology use in different settings. Studying a single user across a range of devices and tasks provides a broader and more nuanced understanding of the contexts and causes of task failure and of the workarounds employed than is possible with a more narrowly focused usability study. Themes that were revealed across a range of tasks include the importance for technologies to not "mark" the user as being blind within a predominantly sighted social world, to support user independence through portability and user control, and to allow user "resets" and brute-force fallbacks in the face of persistent task failure.

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