ASSETS: U: Constructing Agency and Usability Through Community-Driven Assistive Technology Design

Despite assistive technologies existing to help people with disabilities interact with software, these tools are often hard to use and not personalized to what a user individually needs. In response to these challenges, new work in the maker community has sought to empower people with disabilities to build their own assitive technologies and to create agency over how one can interact with technology. We discuss current challenges to building assistive technology and overcome these obstacles by presenting V11, a simple cross-platform programming interface to enable the creation of community-driven assistive technology. To evaluate the effectiveness of V11 in environments with novice programmers, we conducted design workshops with undergraduate CS students, who brainstormed solutions to a real accessibility problem and then used V11 to prototype their idea. We found that V11 can help students with limited programming experience build complex assistive technologies and we discuss next steps to engage communities in the creation of these personalized assistive tools.