Hi I'm Zhuohao Zhang and today I'll be
presenting our work CollabAlly, a system
that aims to make collaboration
awareness accessible in document editing
here I also speak for my co-authors
Cheuk Yin Phipson Lee, Jaylin Herskovitz,
JooYoung Seo and Anhong Guo
collaborative document editing usually
consists of understanding what other
collaborators are doing in the document
reading and responding to comments
as well as tracking and making text
edits
however collaborative editing is
challenging for blind users who usually
lack the understanding of different
visual cues in a document
struggle to navigate through different
elements and have very limited access to
automatic real-time updates about the
collaboration activities
to address these challenges
we conducted a co-design study with our
blind co-author JooYoung to build
CollabAlly upon a common collaborative editing
tool Google Docs
we co-designed CollabAlly over three
sessions and achieved two primary goals:
to understand the current practices and
challenges that screen reader users have
in collaborative editing
and to inform system iteration in the
next stage
after iteration collaboration uses a
three-layer model to first
extract the state of the collaborative
environment
second identify and represent key
collaboration activities in the
environment and finally present it to
blind users in an accessible and
understandable manner
to extract a collaborative environment
we first fetch the dom structure of the
Google Docs
using both a front-end browser extension
and a back-end server
from there we identify classes and HTML
elements in the document that can be
used to represent collaborators
behaviors comment updates and text
changes
finally we present this information to
blind users in real time using earcons
and designed a dialog box interface
through which blind users can navigate
and access collaboration activities
using keyboard shortcuts and screen
reader commands
we also incorporated spatial audio and
voice fonts to further contextualize who
where and when certain collaboration
activities took place in the document
to demonstrate how CollabAlly works
in the real world scenario our co-author
JooYoung uses CollabAlly to review and
edit one of our study materials
first two collaborators showed up in the
document at different locations
today I'm going to go over the study
material we use and resolve some
comments
first of all I wonder if there are any
other collaborators on our team that are
in the current document with me
let me press alt shift one
in the dialog box I'm going to press h
key to go to the next heading
(SR: collaborator)
(SR: Renee Jones) let me click this by
pressing space bar
I hear female voice of font
on my right
hand
I hear this spatial audio sound on my
coming from my right
I understand this a little bit below
from my current location
now a collaborator asks for suggestions
by adding a new comment
oh
this earcon indicates somebody has just
came to the same paragraph as mine
I wonder who that is
and
oh somebody has just left a comment let
me check it out by pressing alt shift 1.
let me press comment button
here is comment summary on page one
(SR: what do you think this is one of those)
(SR: people)
oh
so she left this comment
so let me
use blind people
as a reply
after reading the reply other
collaborators made text changes in the
document I wonder what text changes have
been made so I'm going to check it by
pressing alt shift one
in the dialog box
I'll click text changes
in the text changes
dialog box I'm going to press hkey
there is only one text change
and three style changes the second
changes
change is about
text modification
from sense making
to tracking of collab online
to evaluate CollabAlly we ran a user
study with 11 blind and low vision users
who were unable to read any script we
asked participants to complete a series
of collaborative editing tasks using
either Google Docs accessibility
settings or CollabAlly
the tasks included the three main
collaboration activities we defined
which are locating collaborators, working
with comments, identifying text changes,
and one free form writing task in which
we ask participants to answer a few
open-ended questions freely
two results from participants who use
Google Docs confirmed our findings on
blind people's current practices and
challenges and the other nine results
reported collaborative usability
we asked participants to rate the level
of easiness using CollabAlly to
complete the tasks and helpfulness of
CollabAlly's information provided after
each task
and the results showed that most
participants agreed or strongly agreed
that it was easy to complete the editing
tasks using CollabAlly and the
information provided in it was useful
from their feedback we summarized the
most liked features of CollabAlly
including deep integration with existing
tool easy navigation sonification with
spatial features and fits into users
current workflow
we also summarized suggestions from
participants they wanted to have audio
customization direct copy and search
navigation by clicking and better
integration with screen readers like
NVDA and JAWS
in the next phase we plan to better
integrate our system with the current
assistive technology ecosystem and
extend it in different layers including
exploring other non-speech audios, build
upon other screen readers, and consider
other collaborative environments beyond
document editing
through our research we demonstrate that
CollabAlly provides improved access to
collaboration awareness by centralizing
scattered information, sonifying visual
information, and simplifying complex
operations
we envisioned that with CollabAlly
many existing collaborative editing
tools can also be improved to provide
better collaborative awareness and
accessibility support for blind users
thank you for listening