CAREER: Empowering People Who are Blind to Create Personal Assistive Technology

People who are blind use assistive tools to read text, recognize objects, and get around. These tools work well for common use cases. However, this one-size-fits-all approach does not address many of the specific needs. As a result, people who are blind put forth a lot of effort to find workarounds to overcome these challenges. These solutions are often tedious, overwhelming, and do not work well. This project empowers people who are blind to create their own personal assistive technology to meet their specific needs. Personal computers have changed the way people create and innovate. Personal assistive technology may enable people who are blind to become more independent. This project provides them with a way to create their own solutions. This research program aims to transform the creation of assistive technology. A primary goal is to empower people who are blind to make their own solutions. This is accomplished using novel tools powered by artificial intelligence and end-user programming. This work helps to meet the persistent and specific needs of people who are blind instead of using one-size-fits-all solutions. The research will follow a human-centered design, development, and evaluation process. First, it will contribute to a deeper understanding of the more specific needs of people who are blind. The results and impacts will be recognized from a group to an individual level. Second, it will contribute a framework to support the creation of personal assistive technology using end-user programming. Third, it will identify and contribute methods to adapt user creations to be easy to share, discover, and reuse. This project will use developed tools to teach programming and computer science concepts to blind learners and users. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.