Ideating for Co-designing with Blind and Visually Impaired Users:

Access to information about the pandemic has been a major invisible barrier for people with visual impairments. As governments around the globe rush to distribute guidelines for the prevention of COVID-19 infections, the websites neglected to follow accessibility standards; thus, leaving out millions of users. Similar problems have been reported in acquiring information about medical help, such as locations for getting tested for COVID and even information about hospitals that accepted infected patients. On the other hand, digital-economy based rideshare services in many cases refused blind passengers, particularly if their destination was a medical facility. This problem has particularly been aggravated due to the absence of an easy-to-use, accessible reporting mechanism for the denial of such services by individual drivers. Those of us who have worked side by side with blind colleagues as participants in our design work, or as co-designers, are not unfamiliar with expressions of serious concern about the availability of information and reliability of technological infrastructure. Life for a majority of blind people, users, designers, academics, and citizens, was always unpredictable and it is definitely so in these pandemic times. This late-breaking poster paper presents the preliminary results of an in-progress survey of blind and low vision users in the United States which gauges the accessibility of healthcare information and related services during this pandemic. The results thus far reveal major identifiable access barriers to healthcare information on websites, HCI issues with telemedicine, information and reservation process about accessing COVID-19 vaccine sites, and digitally-dependent transportation.