research-article

Stories from the Front Seat: Supporting Accessible Transportation in the Sharing Economy

Authors:

Robin N. Brewer,

Nicole B. EllisonAuthors Info & Claims

Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, Volume 3, Issue CSCW

Article No.: 95, Pages 1 - 17

https://doi.org/10.1145/3359197

Published: 07 November 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Ridesharing services like Uber and Lyft play an important role in broadening access to affordable, efficient transportation for people with vision impairments by providing an alternative to public transit, friends, or family. While previous work has focused on the challenges that people with disabilities experience using public transportation and how they interact with ridesharing drivers, little research has focused on the people in the "front seat" and how drivers support people with vision impairments during rides. To better understand these interactions, we interviewed 18 ridesharing drivers who had experience driving passengers with a disability, specifically people with vision impairments. Our findings show that ridesharing drivers engage in different forms of labor (i.e. physical, relational) to support passengers with disabilities and are seeking ways to learn more about disability. Contrary to most previous literature on ridesharing and the sharing economy, we find that drivers do not see this labor as a burden. We discuss ethical and design considerations for the complex process of disability disclosure, wherein passengers might benefit from having drivers know in advance about their disability, but also open themselves up to possible exploitation by drivers.

References

[1]

2018. Blindness and vision impairment. Technical Report. World Health Organization. https://www.who.int/news-room/ fact-sheets/detail/blindness-and-visual-impairment

[2]

2018. Blindness and vision impairment. Technical Report. World Health Organization. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/blindness-and-visual-impairment

[3]

Ali Abdolrahmani, William Easley, Michele A. Williams, Erick Ronquillo, Stacy Branham, Tiffany Chen, and Amy Hurst. 2016. Not All Errors are Created Equal: Factors that Impact Acceptance of an Indoor Navigation Aid for the Blind. In Proceedings of the 18th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility - ASSETS '16. ACM Press, New York, New York, USA, 301--302. https://doi.org/10.1145/2982142.2982210

Digital Library

[4]

Nazanin Andalibi and Andrea Forte. 2018. Announcing pregnancy loss on Facebook: A decision-making framework for stigmatized disclosures on identified social network sites. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 158.

Digital Library

[5]

Nazanin Andalibi, Pinar Ozturk, and Andrea Forte. 2017. Sensitive Self-disclosures, Responses, and Social Support on Instagram: the case of# depression. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM conference on computer supported cooperative work and social computing. ACM, 1485--1500.

Digital Library

[6]

Shiri Azenkot, Sanjana Prasain, Alan Borning, Emily Fortuna, Richard E. Ladner, and Jacob O. Wobbrock. 2011. Enhancing independence and safety for blind and deaf-blind public transit riders. In Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference on Human factors in computing systems - CHI '11. ACM Press, New York, New York, USA, 3247. https: //doi.org/10.1145/1978942.1979424

[7]

Nancy K. Baym. 2018. Playing to the Crowd: Musicians, Audiences, and the Intimate Work of Connection. NYU Press.

[8]

Julie Beck. 2018. The Concept Creep of 'Emotional Labor'. The Atlantic (2018). https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/11/arlie-hochschild-housework-isnt-emotional-labor/576637/

[9]

Cynthia Bennett, Erin Brady, and Stacy M. Branham. 2018. Interdependence as a Frame for Assistive Technology Research and Design. In ASSETS. https://doi.org/10.1145/3234695.3236348

Digital Library

[10]

Courtney Blackwell, Jeremy Birnholtz, and Charles Abbott. 2015. Seeing and being seen: Co-situation and impression formation using Grindr, a location-aware gay dating app. New media & society 17, 7 (2015), 1117--1136.

[11]

Stacy M. Branham, Ali Abdolrahmani, William Easley, Morgan Scheuerman, Erick Ronquillo, and Amy Hurst. 2017. "Is Someone There? Do They Have a Gun": How Visual Information about Others Can Improve Personal Safety Management for Blind Individuals. In Proceedings of the 19th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility - ASSETS '17. ACM Press, New York, New York, USA, 260--269. https://doi.org/10.1145/3132525.3132534

Digital Library

[12]

Stacy M. Branham and Shaun K. Kane. 2015. Collaborative Accessibility: How Blind and Sighted Companions Co-Create Accessible Home Spaces. Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI '15 (2015), 2373--2382. https://doi.org/10.1145/2702123.2702511

[13]

Stacy M Branham and Shaun K Kane. 2015. The Invisible Work of Accessibility: How Blind Employees Manage Accessibility in Mixed-Ability Workplaces. Proceedings of the 17th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers & Accessibility (2015), 163--171. https://doi.org/10.1145/2700648.2809864

Digital Library

[14]

Robin Brewer, Meredith Ringel Morris, and Anne Marie Piper. 2016. "Why would anybody do this?": Older Adults' Understanding of and Experiences with Crowd Work. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI '16. ACM Press, New York, New York, USA, 2246--2257. https://doi.org/10.1145/2858036. 2858198

Digital Library

[15]

Robin N. Brewer and Vaishnav Kameswaran. 2019. Understanding Trust, Transportation, and Accessibility through Ridesharing. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI '19. ACM Press, New York, New York, USA, 1--11. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300425

[16]

Herbert Clark and Susan Brennan. 1991. Grounding in communication. Perspectives on Socially Shared Cognition (1991). https://doi.org/10.1037/10096-006

[17]

Tawanna Dillahunt and Tiffany Veinot. 2018. Getting There: Strategies for Addressing Transportation Needs in Underserved Communities. Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI) (2018).

[18]

Tawanna R. Dillahunt, Vaishnav Kameswaran, Linfeng Li, and Tanya Rosenblat. 2017. Uncovering the Values and Constraints of Real-time Ridesharing for Low-resource Populations. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI '17. ACM Press, New York, New York, USA, 2757--2769. https://doi.org/10. 1145/3025453.3025470

Digital Library

[19]

Kerry Dobransky and Eszter Hargittai. 2006. The disability divide in internet access and use. Information, Communication & Society 9, 3 (jun 2006), 313--334. https://doi.org/10.1080/13691180600751298

[20]

Bryan Dosono, Yasmeen Rashidi, Taslima Akter, Bryan Semaan, and Apu Kapadia. 2017. Challenges in transitioning from civil to military culture: Hyper-selective disclosure through ICTs. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 1, CSCW (2017), 41.

Digital Library

[21]

Heather A. Faucett, Kate E. Ringland, Amanda L. L. Cullen, and Gillian R. Hayes. 2017. (In)Visibility in Disability and Assistive Technology. ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing 10, 4 (2017), 1--17. https://doi.org/10.1145/3132040

Digital Library

[22]

German H. Flores and Roberto Manduchi. 2018. A Public Transit Assistant for Blind Bus Passengers. IEEE Pervasive Computing 17, 1 (jan 2018), 49--59. https://doi.org/10.1109/MPRV.2018.011591061

Digital Library

[23]

Bláithín AM Gallagher, Patricia M Hart, Colm O'Brien, Michael R Stevenson, and Andrew J Jackson. 2011. Mobility and access to transport issues as experienced by people with vision impairment living in urban and rural Ireland. Disability and rehabilitation 33, 12 (2011), 979--988.

[24]

Yanbo Ge, Christopher Knittel, Don MacKenzie, and Stephen Zoepf. 2016. Racial and Gender Discrimination in Transportation Network Companies. Technical Report. National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA. https://doi.org/10.3386/w22776

[25]

Mareike Glöss, Moira McGregor, and Barry Brown. 2016. Designing for Labour: Uber and the On-Demand Mobile Workforce. Proceedings of the 2016 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems (2016), 1632--1643. https: //doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858476

Digital Library

[26]

Erving Goffman. 1982. The presentation of self in everyday life. In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. 1--10.

[27]

Marilyn Golden. 1991. The Americans with disabilities act of 1990. Journal of Vocational Rehabilitation (1991). https://doi.org/10.3233/JVR-1991--1204

[28]

Markus Guentert. 2011. Improving public transit accessibility for blind riders. In The proceedings of the 13th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility - ASSETS '11. ACM Press, New York, New York, USA, 317. https://doi.org/10.1145/2049536.2049626

Digital Library

[29]

Oliver L Haimson, Jed R Brubaker, Lynn Dombrowski, and Gillian R Hayes. 2015. Disclosure, stress, and support during gender transition on Facebook. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing. ACM, 1176--1190.

Digital Library

[30]

Arlie Russell Hochschild. 1979. Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure. Amer. J. Sociology (1979). https://doi.org/10.1086/227049

[31]

Ronald H. Humphrey, Blake E. Ashforth, and James M. Diefendorff. 2015. The bright side of emotional labor. Journal of Organizational Behavior 36, 6 (aug 2015), 749--769. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.2019

[32]

Lisa I Iezzoni, Mary B Killeen, and Bonnie L O'day. 2006. Rural residents with disabilities confront substantial barriers to obtaining primary care. Health services research 41, 4p1 (2006), 1258--1275.

[33]

Jingjing Jiang. 2019. More Americans are using ride-hailing apps. Technical Report. Pew Research Center.

[34]

Vaishnav Kameswaran, Lindsey Cameron, and Tawanna R Dillahunt. 2018. Support for social and cultural capital development in real-time ridesharing services. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 342.

Digital Library

[35]

Vaishnav Kameswaran, Jatin Gupta, Joyojeet Pal, Sile O'Modhrain, Tiffany C. Veinot, Robin Brewer, Aakanksha Parameshwar, Vidhya Y, and Jacki O'Neill. 2018. 'We can go anywhere': Understanding Independence through a Case Study of Ride-hailing Use by People with Visual Impairments in metropolitan India. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 2, CSCW (nov 2018). https://doi.org/10.1145/3274354

Digital Library

[36]

Airi Lampinen, Vilma Lehtinen, Asko Lehmuskallio, and Sakari Tamminen. 2011. We're in it together: interpersonal management of disclosure in social network services. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems. ACM, 3217--3226.

Digital Library

[37]

Christoph Lutz, Gemma Newlands, and Christian Fieseler. 2018. Emotional Labor in the Sharing Economy. In Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS). https://doi.org/10.24251/HICSS.2018.081

[38]

Fatemeh Mirzaei, Roberto Manduchi, and Sri Kurniawan. 2018. Public Transit Accessibility: Blind Passengers Speak Out. In International Conference on Computers Helping People with Special Needs. Springer, 277--282.

[39]

Amanda Nosko, Eileen Wood, and Seija Molema. 2010. All about me: Disclosure in online social networking profiles: The case of FACEBOOK. Computers in human behavior 26, 3 (2010), 406--418.

[40]

Cathy O'Neil. 2017. Weapons of math destruction: How big data increases inequality and threatens democracy. Broadway Books.

[41]

John R. Porter, Kiley Sobel, Sarah E. Fox, Cynthia L. Bennett, and Julie A. Kientz. 2017. Filtered out: Disability disclosure practices in online dating communities. Proceedings of the ACM: Human-Computer Interaction 1, CSCW 1, November (2017), 13. https://doi.org/10.1145/3134722

[42]

Noopur Raval and Paul Dourish. 2016. Standing Out from the Crowd: Emotional Labor, Body Labor, and Temporal Labor in Ridesharing. Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing - CSCW '16 (2016), 97--107. https://doi.org/10.1145/2818048.2820026

Digital Library

[43]

Zick Rubin. 1975. Disclosing oneself to a stranger: Reciprocity and its limits. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 11, 3 (1975), 233--260.

[44]

Eva Lotta Sallnäs, Jonas Moll, and Kerstin Severinson-Eklundh. 2007. Group work about geometrical concepts among blind and sighted pupils using haptic interfaces. Proceedings - Second Joint EuroHaptics Conference and Symposium on Haptic Interfaces for Virtual Environment and Teleoperator Systems, World Haptics 2007 (2007), 330--335. https://doi.org/10.1109/WHC.2007.61

Digital Library

[45]

Bryan Semaan, Lauren M Britton, and Bryan Dosono. 2017. Military masculinity and the travails of transitioning: Disclosure in social media. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing. ACM, 387--403.

Digital Library

[46]

Kristen Shinohara and Jacob O. Wobbrock. 2011. In the shadow of misperception: Assistive technology use and social interactions. In Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference on Human factors in computing systems. ACM, 705--714. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1979044

[47]

Christine Spencer, Kevin Frick, Emily W Gower, John H Kempen, and Jennifer L Wolff. 2009. Disparities in access to medical care for individuals with vision impairment. Ophthalmic epidemiology 16, 5 (2009), 281--288.

[48]

Jessica Vitak. 2012. The impact of context collapse and privacy on social network site disclosures. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 56, 4 (2012), 451--470.

[49]

Michele A. Williams, Caroline Galbraith, Shaun K. Kane, and Amy Hurst. 2014. "just let the cane hit it": how the blind and sighted see navigation differently. In Proceedings of the 16th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers & accessibility - ASSETS '14. ACM Press, 217--224. https://doi.org/10.1145/2661334.2661380

Digital Library

[50]

Michele A. Williams, Amy Hurst, and Shaun K. Kane. 2013. "Pray before you step out": describing personal and situational blind navigation behaviors. In Proceedings of the 15th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility - ASSETS '13. ACM Press, 1--8. https://doi.org/10.1145/2513383.2513449

[51]

Rayoung Yang, Sangmi Park, Sonali R. Mishra, Zhenan Hong, Clint Newsom, Hyeon Joo, Erik Hofer, and Mark W. Newman. 2011. Supporting spatial awareness and independent wayfinding for pedestrians with visual impairments. In The proceedings of the 13th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility - ASSETS '11. 27. https://doi.org/10.1145/2049536.2049544

[52]

Chien Wen Yuan, Benjamin V. Hanrahan, Sooyeon Lee, Mary Beth Rosson, and John M. Carroll. 2017. I Didn't Know that You Knew I Knew: Collaborative Shopping Practices between People with Visual Impairment and People with Vision. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 1, CSCW (2017), 1--18. https://doi.org/10.1145/3134753

Cited By

Gebresselassie M(2025)Labor issues from the perspective of drivers on the Uber and Lyft apps and the impact on riders who use wheelchairsTravel Behaviour and Society10.1016/j.tbs.2024.10089138(100891)Online publication date: Jan-2025
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tbs.2024.100891
Barbareschi GRyoichi AKawaguchi MTakeda MMinamizawa K(2024)SeaHare: An omidirectional electric wheelchair integrating independent, remote and shared control modalitiesProceedings of the 26th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility10.1145/3663548.3675657(1-16)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3663548.3675657
Fink PMilne HCaccese AAlsamsam MLoranger JColley MGiudice N(2024)Accessible Maps for the Future of Inclusive RidesharingProceedings of the 16th International Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications10.1145/3640792.3675736(106-115)Online publication date: 22-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3640792.3675736
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Stories from the Front Seat: Supporting Accessible Transportation in the Sharing Economy
1. Human-centered computing

Recommendations

Understanding Trust, Transportation, and Accessibility through Ridesharing
CHI '19: Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Relatively few studies of accessibility and transportation for people with vision impairments have investigated forms of transportation besides public transportation and walking. To develop a more nuanced understanding of this context, we turn to ...
Real-Time City-Scale Taxi Ridesharing
We proposed and developed a taxi-sharing system that accepts taxi passengers' real-time ride requests sent from smart phones and schedules proper taxis to pick up them via ride sharing, subject to time, capacity, and monetary constraints. The monetary ...
On Ridesharing Competition and Accessibility: Evidence from Uber, Lyft, and Taxi
WWW '18: Proceedings of the 2018 World Wide Web Conference

Ridesharing services such as Uber and Lyft have become an important part of the Vehicle For Hire (VFH) market, which used to be dominated by taxis. Unfortunately, ridesharing services are not required to share data like taxi services, which has made it ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction

Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction Volume 3, Issue CSCW

November 2019

5026 pages

EISSN:2573-0142

DOI:10.1145/3371885

Editors:
Airi Lampinen
Stockholm University, Sweden
,
Darren Gergle
Northwestern University, USA
,
David A. Shamma
FXPAL, USA

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2019 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 07 November 2019

Published in PACMHCI Volume 3, Issue CSCW

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

12
Total Citations
View Citations
440
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)59
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)9

Reflects downloads up to 07 Mar 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Gebresselassie M(2025)Labor issues from the perspective of drivers on the Uber and Lyft apps and the impact on riders who use wheelchairsTravel Behaviour and Society10.1016/j.tbs.2024.10089138(100891)Online publication date: Jan-2025
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tbs.2024.100891
Barbareschi GRyoichi AKawaguchi MTakeda MMinamizawa K(2024)SeaHare: An omidirectional electric wheelchair integrating independent, remote and shared control modalitiesProceedings of the 26th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility10.1145/3663548.3675657(1-16)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3663548.3675657
Fink PMilne HCaccese AAlsamsam MLoranger JColley MGiudice N(2024)Accessible Maps for the Future of Inclusive RidesharingProceedings of the 16th International Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications10.1145/3640792.3675736(106-115)Online publication date: 22-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3640792.3675736
Brinkley JHuff EGluck AEnam M(2024)An Autoethnographic Study of the Waymo One Autonomous Ridesharing Ecosystem: Exploring Issues of Accessibility2024 IEEE 4th International Conference on Human-Machine Systems (ICHMS)10.1109/ICHMS59971.2024.10555855(1-6)Online publication date: 15-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICHMS59971.2024.10555855
Gebresselassie M(2024)Why app-hailed transportation remains inadequately accessible to wheelchair usersDisability & Society10.1080/09687599.2024.2397731(1-6)Online publication date: 29-Aug-2024
https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2024.2397731
Venkataram PFlynn JBhuiya MBarajas JHandy S(2024)Availability and usability of transportation for people with disabilities depending on what the user is expected to doTransportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives10.1016/j.trip.2023.10096023(100960)Online publication date: Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trip.2023.100960
Kameswaran VY VMarathe M(2023)Advocacy as Access Work: How People with Visual Impairments Gain Access to Digital Banking in IndiaProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35795967:CSCW1(1-23)Online publication date: 16-Apr-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3579596
Fink PAlsamsam MBrown JKindler HGiudice N(2023)Give us something to chauffeur it: Exploring user needs in traditional and fully autonomous ridesharing for people who are blind or visually impairedTransportation Research Part F: Traffic Psychology and Behaviour10.1016/j.trf.2023.09.00498(91-103)Online publication date: Oct-2023
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trf.2023.09.004
Fink PDoore SLin XMaring MZhao PNygaard ABeals GCorey RPerry RFreund KDimitrov VGiudice N(2023)The Autonomous Vehicle Assistant (AVA)International Journal of Human-Computer Studies10.1016/j.ijhcs.2023.103125179:COnline publication date: 1-Nov-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2023.103125
Schuß MRollwagen ARiener A(2022)Understanding Operator Influence in Automated Urban Shuttle Buses and Recommendations for Future DevelopmentMultimodal Technologies and Interaction10.3390/mti61201096:12(109)Online publication date: 13-Dec-2022
https://doi.org/10.3390/mti6120109
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Article

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Figures

Tables

Media

View Issue’s Table of Contents