Description
Assistive technologies, such as smartphone-based object-recognition (OR) apps, provide visual assistance to people who are blind or low-vision to enable increased independent participation in society. While previous research has explored the functional accessibility of object-recognition technologies, little attention has been given to their social accessibility, particularly in interdependent socio-cultural contexts of the Global South. Through a mixed-methods approach, employing a seven-day diary study followed by one-on-one interviews with seven OR app users in India, we explore their experiences in depth. Our findings highlight the nuances of what interdependence looks like in a multicultural, Indian society, as people navigate public and private spheres with a camera-based assistive technology designed for independent, western contexts. We argue for the necessity to design assistive technologies following the interdependence framework that accommodates the social and cultural context of the Global South. Additionally, we propose design guidelines for assistive technologies in community-oriented societies, emphasizing community-centered approaches, cultural alignment, and locally adaptable designs.
Citation
Gesu India, Simon Robinson, Jennifer Pearson, Cecily Morrison, and Matt Jones. 2025. Exploring the Experiences of Individuals Who are Blind or Low-Vision Using Object-Recognition Technologies in India. In Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ‘25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 570, 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713107.
@inproceedings{10.1145/3706598.3713107,
author = {India, Gesu and Robinson, Simon and Pearson, Jennifer and Morrison, Cecily and Jones, Matt},
title = {Exploring the Experiences of Individuals Who are Blind or Low-Vision Using Object-Recognition Technologies in India},
year = {2025},
isbn = {9798400713941},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713107},
doi = {10.1145/3706598.3713107},
abstract = {Assistive technologies, such as smartphone-based object-recognition (OR) apps, provide visual assistance to people who are blind or low-vision to enable increased independent participation in society. While previous research has explored the functional accessibility of object-recognition technologies, little attention has been given to their social accessibility, particularly in interdependent socio-cultural contexts of the Global South. Through a mixed-methods approach, employing a seven-day diary study followed by one-on-one interviews with seven OR app users in India, we explore their experiences in depth. Our findings highlight the nuances of what interdependence looks like in a multicultural, Indian society, as people navigate public and private spheres with a camera-based assistive technology designed for independent, western contexts. We argue for the necessity to design assistive technologies following the interdependence framework that accommodates the social and cultural context of the Global South. Additionally, we propose design guidelines for assistive technologies in community-oriented societies, emphasizing community-centered approaches, cultural alignment, and locally adaptable designs.},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems},
articleno = {570},
numpages = {11},
keywords = {Object-recognition, vision impairments, human-computer interaction, assistive technologies, low-resource environments},
location = {
},
series = {CHI '25}
}