“Vini Jr. celebrating his goal for the Brazilian team along with Neymar at Maracanã stadium”

Here is the image. Is this the image that you had in your mind?

I collaborated with Heejae Kim to design a web-based prototype, and participants for the user testing accessed the website using Safari on iPhone, with VoiceOver. I recruited participants from the assistive technology community on Facebook.

A total of five individuals with varying vision conditions were selected to participate in the user test session. This sampling strategy aimed to ensure a diverse range of perspectives and experiences to be represented in the evaluation of the prototype.

Here are the key findings from our user testing: mainly participants loved Dimensional Alt Text because it provides more context about the background of images. Other participants expressed that the number of imensional thumbnails shown below the image can make users understand the structure and the angle of the photo at a glance, especially for images that do not have a middle or a background.

I wrote a small paper* out of the project with my co-author Heejae, and it was accepted to CHI 23 UX conference. We had an opportunity to present our work in Hamburg last week and received valuable feedback and insights from researchers and designers.

Thanks to their feedback, I am planning to write a full paper on dimensional alt text.

* Jaemin Cho and Hee Jae Kim. 2023. Dimensional alt text: Enhancing Spatial Understanding through Dimensional Layering of Image Descriptions for Screen Reader Users. In Extended Abstracts of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ‘23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 86, 1–6. https://doi. org/10.1145/3544549.3585706

Now I want to shift our focus from on-screen accessibility to accessibility in physical spaces, and the spaces are restaurants.

QR code menus are more accessible than braille menus, but it has a problem.

Small restaurants, with the exception of chain stores, typically do not offer braille menus. Low-vision users may not be able to read braille. QR code menus can provide greater accessibility flexibility in these situations. But there is a problem in the scenario.

60 %

According to a survey, 60% of customers with visual impairments found it challenging to use QR codes independently, mainly due to difficulty in finding them*. A consistent standard for the location is needed.

* VocalEyes. “Digital Accessibility: QR Codes and Short Number SMS.” VocalEyes, 2021. https://vocaleyes.co.uk/research/digital-accessibility-qr-codes-and-short-number-sms/.

Beacon is a table mood light with QR code sign for BLV customers at restaurants.