[Silence]
Hi! My name is Rahaf Alharbi.
I’m Ph.D. student at the University of Michigan.
Today, I’m presenting our paper tilted “Understanding Emerging Obfuscation Technologies in Visual Description Services for Blind and Low Vision People”
This work is co-authored with Robin Brewer and Sarita Schoenebeck at the School of Information in the University of Michigan.
So what do I mean by visual description services?
They are tools that enable Blind and low vision people to navigate different visual contexts.
By using their phone cameras, they could know practical everyday things like if this milk carton is expired or not, picking out a fashionable outfit or watching the sunset.
These services are could be powered by human labor (volunteers or trained agents), AI, or both.
While visual description services are tremendously helpful, they have privacy implications.
Sensitive materials might be accidentally apparent in the background without Blind and low vision people knowing about them.
For example, if a Blind person wanted to know the expiration date of a milk carton
in a less than ideal environment like this messy kitchen where on the left there is a pile of unwashed dishes and on the right there is left overs.
Many might not feel comfortable using a visual description service in this context.
For sighted people, they could potentially manipulate the camera view to only show regions of interest.
However, that might be difficult for Blind and low vision people
To preserve privacy, scholars have been building obfuscation systems that automatically detect elements thought to be sensitive, private, or even embarrassing.
And then remove these elements by applying various filters such as blur or mask. As a result, Blind people might feel more comfortable using visual description services.
While past work suggests integrating obfuscation into visual description technologies,
the opinions and perspectives of Blind and low vision people are largely missing.
Thus, our work poses and explores the following question:
how do Blind and low vision people want to experience and engage with obfuscation?
To answer this question, we conducted 20 semi-structured interviews with Blind and low vision people who often use visual description services and live in the United States
We were inspired by speculative design approaches to include an imagination session where we briefly described obfuscation to participants.
The goal of this session was to understand what participants think about obfuscation and how would they improve it.
To analyze the data, we used reflexive thematic analysis.
For more information, I encourage you refer to the methods section in our paper.
Now I will cover key findings from our research.
First, we found that participants wanted to enact more control over obfuscation.
Second, there were tensions with interpreting and understanding obfuscation outcomes.
One way participants wanted to enact control over obfuscation was through choosing obfuscation content.
Nearly all participants recognized that privacy decisions are complicated.
For that reason, they wanted to have the option to choose what type of content should be obfuscated and when rather than having a top-down approach enforced on them.
Many participants explained that privacy is subjective and varies at an individual value.
Some were worried that their own privacy needs would not be reflected in obfuscation systems, especially as they were minorities in the United States.
As Saad told us: [READS QUOTE]
Because each person has their own privacy calculus that might be overlooked in obfuscation systems, being able to choose obfuscation content is important.
The second major finding was around tensions with interpreting obfuscation outcomes.
That is, participants highlighted the difficulty of knowing if obfuscation occurred correctly or not.
Eloquently summarized by David: [READ QUOTE]
Without a way for Blind and low vision people to notice, obfuscation systems might wrongfully obscure elements or shift around as users move their phone
Findings highlight a disconnect between popular trends in obfuscation research and the needs of Blind and low people.
Our analysis reveals that participants opposed fully automated obfuscation approaches.
Rather, participants wanted to be actively involved in the obfuscation process.
To improve obfuscation, we situate our findings within the framework of interdependence, which positions accessibility as a process that is co-created between communities, structures, and environments.
Through foregrounding interdependence, we were able to:
Complicate privacy concerns
Establish safety mechanisms
Recognize The Added Effort on Blind and Low Vision People
In this talk, I will focus on the first two
Around complicating privacy concerns
And establishing safety measures
Our analysis rejects automatic approaches to obfuscation that enforces limited definitions of privacy
Because interdependence is largely theorized and practiced by disability justice communities
it underscores the importance of understanding privacy beyond a singular identity approach, which past work has done,
and towards considering how racial and ethnic backgrounds inform privacy considerations
interdependence encourages us to establish safety measures for obfuscation mistakes rather than try to build “error-free” systems that do not exist.
Currently, the design of obfuscation systems actively conceals errors from Blind and low vision people
Therefore, we need to think of transparency beyond “seeing” outcomes and towards establishing non-visual transparency methods.
One example could be platform-level protocols of giving users options and agency over their data
To summarize our paper
Our research emphasized that adding AI in visual privacy access technologies is far from simple.
In fact, popular approaches are misaligned with the needs of Blind people.
They contribute to added cognitive labor for Blind and low vision people
And tensions with knowing if the technique worked correctly
We also argue that interdependence is a generative framework for unpacking accessibility frictions in human-AI interaction
Thank you so much!
If you have any questions, I'm open to being contacted synchronously in the conference
Or asynchronously via email. My email is rmalharb@umich.edu