Voice-Activated Personal Assistants (VAPAs)-like Apple Siri and Amazon Alexa-have rapidly become common features on mobile devices and in homes of millions of people around the world. They have proven to be particularly valuable to people with disabilities, chiefly among people with visual impairments. Yet, we still know relatively little about the fundamental metaphors and guidelines for designing voice assistants, and how they might empower and constrain visually impaired users. To address this need, we conducted a qualitative document review of VAPA design guidelines published by top commercial vendors Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple and Alibaba. We found that guidelines have many commonalities that surface an underlying assumption that VAPA interfaces should be modeled after human-human conversation. We draw on prior work about needs of people with visual impairments to critique this taken-for-granted human-human conversation metaphor and offer amendments to prevailing design guidelines that can make this now-pervasive platform more fully achieve its potential to become universally usable.

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.

Voice-Activated Personal Assistants (VAPAs) like Amazon's Alexa and Google Assistant have rapidly become pervasive, with users spanning from the youngest young to the oldest old of our society. However, little is known about the nascent VAPA interaction paradigm: what are the fundamental metaphors and guidelines for design, and how do they constrain potential uses and users? This poster begins to answer these questions through a qualitative document review of VAPA design guidelines published by Amazon and Google. Initial results show that human-human conversation is considered the gold standard of interaction. We present an argument that troubles this assumption by adopting a lens of accessible interface design for blind individuals. We advocate VAPA design that moves beyond being human.