Brews and Brains at UCI is a student-led initiative to support science communication to the general public, a topic near and dear to my heart. So, when they invited me to share my team’s research on voice assistants and people with vision impairments at a local pub, I was all in. This event took place on October 15, 2019. As of December, the work I draw on is or will soon be reported in academic-ese in various venues:

• Storer, K., Judge, T.K, Branham, S.M. “‘All in the Same Boat’: Tradeoffs of Voice Assistant Ownership for Mixed-Visual-Ability Families.” CHI 2020, forthcoming
• Abdolrahmani, A., Storer, K.M., Mukkath Roy, A.R., Kuber, R., & Branham, S.M. Blind Leading the Sighted: Drawing Design Insights from Blind Users Towards More Productivity-Oriented Voice Interfaces. TACCESS Journal. forthcoming
• Branham, S.M. & Mukkath Roy, A.R. “Reading Between the Guidelines: How Commercial Voice Assistant Guidelines Hinder Accessibility for Blind Users.” ASSETS 2019
• Storer, K. & Branham, S.M. “That’s the Way Sighted People Do It: What Blind Parents Can Teach Technology Designers About Co-Reading with Children.” DIS 2019

This was fun to make, and I hope you find it fun and accessible to watch. Many thanks to Brews and Brains, who honored my request to caption the video, and who didn’t tease me when I went for a wine glass instead of a stein:)

Thanks to generous sponsorship from Toyota, in collaboration with UMBC, over the next two years INsite Lab will be developing mobility technologies for people with a range of disabilities. More details here.

I am thrilled to share that I will be joining the faculty at UC Irvine’s Department of Informatics this fall as an Assistant Professor. Dreams do come true:)

http://www.informatics.uci.edu/

Our forthcoming CHI 2018 paper, in 30 seconds:

 

I’m thrilled that a full paper of research I’ve been conducting with my MS thesis student, Morgan Scheuerman, and collaborator Foad Hamidi has been (conditionally) accepted to CHI 2018! Stay tuned for a link to “Gender Recognition or Gender Reductionism? The Social Implications of Automatic Gender Recognition Systems.”

Very excited to help organize a workshop on Inclusive Educational Technologies for People with Visual Impairments with these fine people: Oussama Metatla, Christophe Jouffrais, Jeff Bigham, Stacy Branham, Marcos Serrano, Anja Thieme, Shaun Kane, and Émeline Brulé. Our CfP is coming soon!

Check out our accessible slides (see the slide notes) and paper on technologies for interpersonal safety for people who are blind.

Branham, S.M., Abdolrahmani, A., Easley, W., Scheuerman, M., Ronquillo, E., Hurst, A. “‘Is Someone There? Do They Have a Gun?’: How Visual Information About Others Can Improve Personal Safety Management for Blind Individuals.” In Proceedings of the ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers & Accessibility (ASSETS ’17), Baltimore, MD, October 30 – November 1, 2017. 10 pages. (acceptance rate: 26%)