Early Indicators of the Effect of the Global Shift to Remote Work on People with Disabilities

Key Takeaways

hi my name is john tong and i'm going to talk about early indicators of the effect of the global shift to remote work on people with disabilities i'm a member of the ability research team and our group explores how to make technology accessible to people of all abilities so my position is that people with disabilities are the extreme users that can help us design remote collaboration technologies that are better for everyone and the way we explore this is a study uh that involved 25 interviews of people with disabilities who regularly tell it work that is at least weekly and this happened even before the pandemic response but since the interviews occurred in march and april of 2020 and all the participants were in the united states it occurred during the first month of the pandemic response and so it gave us an early indication of what their reaction was like it's a qualitative study so the data could be used to explore other areas of interest but this chart shows the distribution of folks that we talk to people who are blind or low vision with limited mobility or dexterity people are neurodiverse or deaf or hard of hearing and those with chronic health issues and so you see there's a spread of people of various abilities that we heard from during the interviews so i want to share just one example from our findings um i encourage you to look at the paper for more details but that's the question of not sharing video when you're in a meeting so people with disabilities have a range of reasons why they choose not to share video while they're in a meeting the first quote talks about uh someone who is blind in low vision who obviously being visually impaired the camera doesn't mean very much to them and so they don't turn on their video or maybe even call in on the phone typically and the second quote talks about someone who's neurodiverse who says you know they have to be in the right frame of mind to be able to focus on video in a meeting people who are neurodiverse often need to manage their cognitive effort that they're expending in a meeting and so may choose to not turn on their video even cover the video window so they don't have to spend the effort to manage what's going on now but the thing to point out is that when you turn off your video the digital representation in our remote collaboration tools goes to something like this where if you have a profile picture maybe you would show that picture but otherwise you have a static blank screen and if you don't have a picture maybe you'd only show these generic initials or if you're calling in on the phone you get this very generic phone icon and so this representation of people who don't share their videos in online meetings is a very static and could be interpreted as being not very engaged in the meeting and that creates kind of a barrier that they need to overcome in participating in the meeting especially after the pandemic response where there was more social pressure to turn on video uh this first comment that talks about people wanting to uh have video and so you have to be camera ready more and the second quote talks about you know being on teams meetings everyone wants that human connection so there's an ask that we should all have our video on even though for this person who's blind or low vision that's not what they would normally do so the design and locations is maybe we can create more engaging avatars for when people choose not to share their video so perhaps we could augment like an audio representation that way that we're familiar with on radio programs or other audio editing tools and use the camera as a sensor to perhaps detect uh the emotional expression that's going on and use that to modify the audio signal so that you get a more dynamic and lively and engaging representation of participation even when not sharing the video or there are other sensor driven avatars some of you may remember avatar connect back in 2012 and a recent startup has come up with something called lumi live which has these avatars that mask what's going on behind the scenes and present an image of being fully engaged and meeting i think now that we're all working from home we can relate to these scenarios where things may be going on in the background that we don't really want to share with our collaborators but we do want to stay fully engaged in the conversation and so i hope this shows you some example of how people with disabilities can help identify design implications to make remote work technology better for all of us thank you