ABSTRACT
For people with disability living in low-income neighborhoods, access to technology is compounded by inaccessible designs and relative isolation in poverty. To bring together this segment of population, an NGO in India built Enable Vaani, a voice-based social media platform designed for persons with disability living in rural areas without internet connectivity. This system has been in deployment since 2016 and has reached over 25,000 users. We present a mixed-methods analysis utilizing system logs and qualitative interviews, with the goal of understanding Enable Vaani's impact. We find that posts related to employment, education and government programs are the most listened to and shared. Content uploaded by the Enable Vaani team is listened and bookmarked more per post than any user-generated content, indicating the importance of an active role of platform managers. Besides providing useful information, people reported that the platform serves as a medium for social support. Our analysis also finds areas of improvement: people skip a lot of posts, very few people share, and a large fraction of newcomers leave after the first month. In response to these shortcomings, we suggest strategies that can be useful for voice-based systems: active contribution of content, customized content feed, special strategies for encouraging newcomers, and design changes to make sharing easier.
- A. G Barnett. 2004. Regression to the mean: what it is and how to deal with it. International Journal of Epidemiology 34, 1: 215--220.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Fabricio Benevenuto, Tiago Rodrigues, Meeyoung Cha, and Virgilio Almeida. 2009. Characterizing user behavior in online social networks. In Proceedings of the 9th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement conference - IMC '09, 49. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Dipanjan Chakraborty, Akshay Gupta, and Aaditeshwar Seth. 2019. Experiences from a mobile-based behaviour change campaign on maternal and child nutrition in rural India. In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development-ICTDX '19, 1--11. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Andrew Collins, Dominika Tkaczyk, Akiko Aizawa, and Joeran Beel. 2018. Position Bias in Recommender Systems for Digital Libraries. In Transforming Digital Worlds, 335--344.Google Scholar
- Tiago Cunha, David Jurgens, Chenhao Tan, and Daniel Romero. 2019. Are All Successful Communities Alike? Characterizing and Predicting the Success of Online Communities. The World Wide Web Conference on - WWW'19: 318--328. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Katie Ellis and Gerard Goggin. Disability and social media. The social media handbook: 126--143.Google Scholar
- Alan Foley and Beth A Ferri. 2012. Technology for people, not disabilities: ensuring access and inclusion. Journal of Research in Special Educational Needs 12, 4: 192--200.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Sharad Goel, Duncan J Watts, and Daniel G Goldstein. 2012. The structure of online diffusion networks. In Proceedings of the 13th ACM conference on electronic commerce, 623--638. Google ScholarDigital Library
- László Gyarmati and Tuan Anh Trinh. 2010. Measuring user behavior in online social networks. IEEE network 24, 5: 26--31. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Thorsten Joachims, Laura Granka, Bing Pan, Helene Hem-brooke, Filip Radlinski, and Geri Gay. 2007. Evaluating the accuracy of implicit feedback from clicks and query reformulations in Web search. ACM Transactions on Information Systems 25, 2: 7-es. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Abha Khetarpal. 2014. Information and communication technology (ICT) and disability. Review of market integration 6, 1: 96--113.Google Scholar
- Mukta Kulkarni. 2017. Namma Vaani: Lessons from an unusual social network. Forbes India. Retrieved from http://www.forbesindia.com/article/iim-bangalore/namma-vaani-lessons-from-an-unusual-social-network/48531/1Google Scholar
- Meghana Marathe, Jacki O'Neill, Paromita Pain, and William Thies. 2015. Revisiting CGNet Swara and its impact in rural India. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development, 21. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Anne P. Mintz (ed.). 2012. Web of deceit: misinformation and manipulation in the age of social media. CyberAge Books, Medford, N.J. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Aparna Moitra, Vishnupriya Das, Gram Vaani, Archna Kumar, and Aaditeshwar Seth. 2016. Design Lessons from Creating a Mobile-based Community Media Platform in Rural India. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development, 14. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Office of the Registrar, Govt. of India. 2016. Government of India Census. Retrieved from http://www.censusindia.gov.in/vital_statistics/SRS_Reports_2016.htmlGoogle Scholar
- Philip O'Keefe and others. 2007. People with disabilities in India: From commitments to outcomes. Human Development Unit, South East Asia Region, The World Bank 157: 295583-1220435937125.Google Scholar
- Paul (university Of Michigan) Resnick. 2016. Building successful online communities - evidence-based social design.Google Scholar
- M. J. Salganik. 2006. Experimental Study of Inequality and Unpredictability in an Artificial Cultural Market. Science 311, 5762: 854--856.Google Scholar
- Deepti Samant, Rebecca Matter, and Mark Harniss. 2013. Realizing the potential of accessible ICTs in developing countries. Disability and Rehabilitation: Assistive Technology 8, 1: 11--20.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Amit Sharma and Dan Cosley. 2015. Studying and Modeling the Connection between People's Preferences and Content Sharing. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing, 1246--1257. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Aditya Vashistha, Edward Cutrell, Gaetano Borriello, and William Thies. 2015. Sangeet swara: A community-moderated voice forum in rural india. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 417--426. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Aditya Vashistha, Edward Cutrell, Nicola Dell, and Richard Anderson. 2015. Social media platforms for low-income blind people in india. In Proceedings of the 17th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers & Accessibility, 259--272. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Aditya Vashistha and William Thies. 2012. IVR Junction: Building Scalable and Distributed Voice Forums in the Developing World. In Presented as part of the 6th USENIX/ACM Workshop on Networked Systems for Developing Regions.Google Scholar
- Lilian Weng, Filippo Menczer, and Yong-Yeol Ahn. 2013. Virality Prediction and Community Structure in Social Networks. Scientific Reports 3: 2522.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Jerome White, Mayuri Duggirala, Krishna Kummamuru, and Saurabh Srivastava. 2012. Designing a voice-based employment exchange for rural India. In Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development, 367--373. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Social Media, Political Polarization, and Political Disinformation: A Review of the Scientific Literature by Joshua A. Tucker, Andrew Guess, Pablo Barbera, Cristian Vaccari, Alexandra Siegel, Sergey Sanovich, Denis Stukal, Brendan Nyhan:: SSRN. Retrieved June 2, 2019 from https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3144139Google Scholar
Index Terms
- Learnings from deploying a voice-based social platform for people with disability
Recommendations
Use of social media by people with visual impairments: usage levels, attitudes and barriers
ICCHP'12: Proceedings of the 13th international conference on Computers Helping People with Special Needs - Volume Part ISocial medias are a central arena for participation, in social life, politics, business and working life. This paper aims to document the social media use among people with visual impairments (VI) in Norway, and to explore some barriers and motivational ...
Living Disability Theory: Reflections on Access, Research, and Design
ASSETS '20: Proceedings of the 22nd International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and AccessibilityAccessibility research and disability studies are intertwined fields focused on, respectively, building a world more inclusive of people with disability and understanding and elevating the lived experiences of disabled people. Accessibility research ...
What Makes Videos Accessible to Blind and Visually Impaired People?
CHI '21: Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsUser-generated videos are an increasingly important source of information online, yet most online videos are inaccessible to blind and visually impaired (BVI) people. To find videos that are accessible, or understandable without additional description ...
Comments