Reading Between the Guidelines: How Commercial Voice Assistant Guidelines Hinder Accessibility for Blind Users

Voice-Activated Personal Assistants (VAPAs)-like Apple Siri and Amazon Alexa - have rapidly become common features on mobile devices and in homes of millions of people around the world. They have proven to be particularly valuable to people with disabilities, chiefly among people with visual impairments. Yet, we still know relatively little about the fundamental metaphors and guidelines for designing voice assistants, and how they might empower and constrain visually impaired users. To address this need, we conducted a qualitative document review of VAPA design guidelines published by top commercial vendors Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple and Alibaba. We found that guidelines have many commonalities that surface an underlying assumption that VAPA interfaces should be modeled after human-human conversation. We draw on prior work about needs of people with visual impairments to critique this taken-for-granted human-human conversation metaphor and offer amendments to prevailing design guidelines that can make this now-pervasive platform more fully achieve its potential to become universally usable.