skip to main content
10.1145/3517428.3551355acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesassetsConference Proceedingsconference-collections
short-paper
Public Access

Where Are You Taking Me? Reflections from Observing Ridesharing Use By People with Visual Impairments

Published: 22 October 2022 Publication History

Abstract

Ridesharing services have become a popular mode of transportation that holds significant benefits for people with disabilities unable to operate conventional motor vehicles. Prior work shows how these services enable people with vision impairments to travel independently without the use of public transportation or walking. We conducted a study in which we observed 17 blind or visually impaired participants using the Uber ridesharing service to explore the social and accessibility dynamics they perceived during their experiences. This paper presents a case study of the process used for our research, reflecting on aspects that considerably impacted the study. Key takeaways include study site considerations, recruiting participants, balancing realism with participant safety, and the unintended side effects of observations in a ridesharing context. The reflection points provided will help readers in considering important study aspects when conducting observations with participants with disabilities, particularly in a ridesharing setting.

References

[1]
Khaled Albusays, Stephanie Ludi, and Matt Huenerfauth. 2017. Interviews and Observation of Blind Software Developers at Work to Understand Code Navigation Challenges. In Proceedings of the 19th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Baltimore, Maryland, USA) (ASSETS ’17). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 91–100. https://doi.org/10.1145/3132525.3132550
[2]
Pranjal Protim Borah and Keyur Sorathia. 2019. Direct Observation of Tactile Geometric Drawing by Visually Impaired and Blind Students. In Proceedings of the 10th Indian Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (Hyderabad, India) (IndiaHCI ’19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 11, 10 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3364183.3364185
[3]
Robin N. Brewer, Amy M. Austin, and Nicole B. Ellison. 2019. Stories from the Front Seat: Supporting Accessible Transportation in the Sharing Economy. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 3, CSCW (Nov. 2019), 95:1–95:17. https://doi.org/10.1145/3359197
[4]
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, Glasgow, Scotland Uk, 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300425
[5]
Julian Brinkley, Brianna Posadas, Julia Woodward, and Juan E. Gilbert. 2017. Opinions and Preferences of Blind and Low Vision Consumers Regarding Self-Driving Vehicles: Results of Focus Group Discussions. In Proceedings of the 19th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility - ASSETS ’17. ACM Press, Baltimore, Maryland, USA, 290–299. https://doi.org/10.1145/3132525.3132532
[6]
Jong Kyu Choi and Yong Gu Ji. 2015. Investigating the Importance of Trust on Adopting an Autonomous Vehicle. International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction 31, 10 (Oct. 2015), 692–702. https://doi.org/10.1080/10447318.2015.1070549
[7]
Audrey Demmitt. [n. d.]. The Transportation Problem: Finding Rides When You Can’t Drive - Visually Impaired: Now What? - VisionAware. https://www.visionaware.org/blog/visually-impaired-now-what/the-transportation-problem-finding-rides-when-you-can%E2%80%99t-drive/12
[8]
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, Denver, Colorado, USA, 2757–2769. https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025470
[9]
Tawanna R. Dillahunt and Amelia R. Malone. 2015. The Promise of the Sharing Economy Among Disadvantaged Communities. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems(CHI ’15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2285–2294. https://doi.org/10.1145/2702123.2702189 event-place: Seoul, Republic of Korea.
[10]
Jinging Jiang. 2019. More Americans are using ride-hailing apps. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/01/04/more-americans-are-using-ride-hailing-apps/ Library Catalog: www.pewresearch.org.
[11]
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(CHI ’18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 342:1–342:12. https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3173916 event-place: Montreal QC, Canada.
[12]
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. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 2, CSCW (Nov. 2018), 85:1–85:24. https://doi.org/10.1145/3274354
[13]
J. Lee, H. Chang, and Y. I. Park. 2018. Influencing Factors on Social Acceptance of Autonomous Vehicles and Policy Implications. In 2018 Portland International Conference on Management of Engineering and Technology (PICMET). 1–6. https://doi.org/10.23919/PICMET.2018.8481760
[14]
National Federation of the Blind. 2019. Blindness Statistics. https://nfb.org/resources/blindness-statistics
[15]
Arulanandam Jude Niranjan and Geert de Haan. 2018. Public Opinion About Self-Driving Vehicles in the Netherlands. In Proceedings of the 36th European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics(ECCE’18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 19:1–19:4. https://doi.org/10.1145/3232078.3232080
[16]
U.S. Department of Transportation. [n. d.]. Transportation Difficulties Keep Over Half a Million Disabled at Home | Bureau of Transportation Statistics. https://www.bts.gov/archive/publications/special_reports_and_issue_briefs/issue_briefs/number_03/entire
[17]
Anon Ymous, Katta Spiel, Os Keyes, Rua M. Williams, Judith Good, Eva Hornecker, and Cynthia L. Bennett. 2020. ”I Am Just Terrified of My Future” — Epistemic Violence in Disability Related Technology Research. In Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Honolulu, HI, USA) (CHI EA ’20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1145/3334480.3381828

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Designing HMI for BVI Users in Fully Automated Vehicles: A Participatory and In-the-field ApproachProceedings of the 26th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility10.1145/3663548.3688507(1-5)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2024
  • (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
  • (2024)The ATLAS Autonomous Vehicle HMI: Leveraging Sensory Substitution to Support the Accessibility Needs of Blind and Low Vision Users2024 IEEE 4th International Conference on Human-Machine Systems (ICHMS)10.1109/ICHMS59971.2024.10555850(1-6)Online publication date: 15-May-2024
  • Show More Cited By

Index Terms

  1. Where Are You Taking Me? Reflections from Observing Ridesharing Use By People with Visual Impairments

        Recommendations

        Comments

        Information & Contributors

        Information

        Published In

        cover image ACM Conferences
        ASSETS '22: Proceedings of the 24th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility
        October 2022
        902 pages
        ISBN:9781450392587
        DOI:10.1145/3517428
        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 ACM 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]

        Sponsors

        Publisher

        Association for Computing Machinery

        New York, NY, United States

        Publication History

        Published: 22 October 2022

        Permissions

        Request permissions for this article.

        Check for updates

        Author Tags

        1. observation study
        2. people with visual impairments
        3. ridesharing

        Qualifiers

        • Short-paper
        • Research
        • Refereed limited

        Funding Sources

        Conference

        ASSETS '22
        Sponsor:

        Acceptance Rates

        ASSETS '22 Paper Acceptance Rate 35 of 132 submissions, 27%;
        Overall Acceptance Rate 436 of 1,556 submissions, 28%

        Upcoming Conference

        ASSETS '25

        Contributors

        Other Metrics

        Bibliometrics & Citations

        Bibliometrics

        Article Metrics

        • Downloads (Last 12 months)232
        • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)32
        Reflects downloads up to 15 Feb 2025

        Other Metrics

        Citations

        Cited By

        View all
        • (2024)Designing HMI for BVI Users in Fully Automated Vehicles: A Participatory and In-the-field ApproachProceedings of the 26th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility10.1145/3663548.3688507(1-5)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2024
        • (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
        • (2024)The ATLAS Autonomous Vehicle HMI: Leveraging Sensory Substitution to Support the Accessibility Needs of Blind and Low Vision Users2024 IEEE 4th International Conference on Human-Machine Systems (ICHMS)10.1109/ICHMS59971.2024.10555850(1-6)Online publication date: 15-May-2024
        • (2022)Toward a Framework for Embodiment in Emerging Transportation Technologies for Facilitating In-Vehicle Experiences for Vulnerable and Disabled Road Users2022 IEEE 3rd International Conference on Human-Machine Systems (ICHMS)10.1109/ICHMS56717.2022.9980810(1-5)Online publication date: 17-Nov-2022

        View Options

        View options

        PDF

        View or Download as a PDF file.

        PDF

        eReader

        View online with eReader.

        eReader

        HTML Format

        View this article in HTML Format.

        HTML Format

        Login options

        Figures

        Tables

        Media

        Share

        Share

        Share this Publication link

        Share on social media