CS and CompE Seminar: Accessible smartphone interaction for blind users using wearable devices

In this talk, I will focus on our work on combining systems research and HCI to make smartphone interactions significantly more accessible to blind people. Blind users interact with their smartphones predominantly using screen readers (using touch interactions) or voice. However, numerous studies have shown that these existing interaction methods pose substantial challenges. The thesis of my talk is that wearable devices can be used to significantly improve the accessibility of smartphone interactions by replacing or augmenting existing interactions methods. Our research combines systems approaches such as virtualization and sensing with a human-centered design to develop generalizable solutions to address accessibility challenges. 

 Bio: Aruna Balasubramanian is an Associate Professor at Stony Brook University.  She received her Ph.D from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and then was a Computing Innovations Fellow at the University of Washington. She works in the area of networked systems, currently focussing on sustainable NLP, accessibility, and quantum networks. She is the recipient of the SIGMOBILE Rockstar award, a Ubicomp best paper award, a VMWare Early Career award, several Google research awards, and the Applied Networking Research Prize. She is passionate about improving the diversity in Computer Science and leads the diversity committee at Stony Brook, is the faculty advisor for the WiCS and WPhD groups at Stony Brook, and is an active member of the N2Women group.