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VideoKheti: making video content accessible to low-literate and novice users

Published: 27 April 2013 Publication History

Abstract

Designing ICT systems for rural users in the developing world is difficult for a variety of reasons ranging from problems with infrastructure to wide differences in user contexts and capabilities. Developing regions may include huge variability in spoken languages, and users are often low- or non-literate, with very little experience interacting with digital technologies. Researchers have explored the use of text-free graphical interfaces as well as speech-based applications to overcome some of the issues related to language and literacy. While there are benefits and drawbacks to each of these approaches, they can be complementary when used together. In this work, we present VideoKheti, a mobile system using speech, graphics, and touch interaction for low-literate farmers in rural India. VideoKheti helps farmers to find and watch agricultural extension videos in their own language and dialect. In this paper, we detail the design and development of VideoKheti and report on a field study with 20 farmers in rural India who were asked to find videos based on a scenario. The results show that farmers could use VideoKheti, but their success still greatly depended on their education level. While participants were enthusiastic about using the system, the multimodal interface did not overcome many obstacles for low-literate users.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '13: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 2013
    3550 pages
    ISBN:9781450318990
    DOI:10.1145/2470654
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    Published: 27 April 2013

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    1. hci4d
    2. ictd
    3. low-literate users
    4. mobile design
    5. multimodal interfaces
    6. novice users
    7. speech interface

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    • (2024)EvolveUI: User Interfaces that Evolve with User ProficiencyProceedings of the 7th ACM SIGCAS/SIGCHI Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies10.1145/3674829.3675078(230-237)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2024
    • (2024)Bridging the Literacy Gap for Adults: Streaming and Engaging in Adult Literacy Education through LivestreamingProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642423(1-15)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
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