Blind Leading the Sighted: Drawing Design Insights from Blind Users towards More Productivity-oriented Voice Interfaces

Voice-activated personal assistants (VAPAs) are becoming smaller, cheaper, and more accurate, such that they are now prevalent in homes (e.g., Amazon Echo, Sonos One) and on mobile devices (e.g., Google Assistant, Apple Siri) around the world. VAPAs offer considerable potential to individuals who are blind, offering efficiencies over gesture-based input on touchscreen devices. However, research is just beginning to reveal the ways in which these technologies are used by people who are blind. In the first of two studies, we interviewed 14 blind adults with experience of home and/or mobile-based VAPAs, surfacing myriad accessibility, usability, and privacy issues for this community. A second study analyzing podcast content from 28 episodes relating to blind interactions with VAPAs was then undertaken to validate and extend findings from the first study. In addition to verifying prior findings, we learned that blind users wanted to leverage VAPAs for more productivity-oriented tasks and increased efficiency over other interaction modalities. We conclude that (1) VAPAs need to support a greater variety of AI personas, each specializing in a specific type of task; (2) VAPAs need to maintain continuity of voice interaction for both usability and accessibility; and (3) blind VAPA users, and especially blind technology podcasters, are expert voice interface users who should be incorporated into design processes from the beginning. We argue that when the blind lead the sighted through voice interface design, both blind and sighted users can benefit.