Stay tuned for some exciting news...maybe.
I'm a third-year PhD student in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, advised by Richard Ladner and Jacob Wobbrock. I am a member of Dr. Wobbrock's AIM Research Group (Accessibile, Interactive, and Mobile computing). My interests include human-computer interaction and accessibility. I'm researching ways to enable people with disabilities to access information online and in the real world, with a focus on mainstream mobile devices.
I will coordinate the DUB group seminars for the 2012-2013 academic year. If you are an HCI researcher, will be in the Seattle area, and are interested in speaking at a seminar, please email me!
Before entering graduate school, I received my bachelor's degree in computer science from Pomona College and worked in the Silicon Valley for a few years.
For more information about my background, please see my CV (updated Mar. 2012).
My work falls under the
MobileAccessibility Project, which aims to provide blind, low-vision, and deaf-blind people with access to information about their environment through mainstream mobile phones.
Perkinput: Nonvisual Touch Screen Text Entry for Mobile Devices
Shiri Azenkot,
Jacob O. Wobbrock
Sanjana Prasain, and
Richard Ladner
Efficient nonvisual text entry is essential for enabling blind and low-vision people to use touch screen devices such as smartphones and tablets effectively. We present Perkinput, a new nonvisual text entry method for mobile touch screen devices. Unlike existing methods where users find and select "soft" keys at predefined regions of the screen, Perkinput users register reference points anywhere on the screen. Users enter characters by touching the screen with 1, 2, or 3 fingers of each hand in patterns based on Braille. The reference points are used to infer which fingers contact the screen with each touch using probabilistic techniques. Perkinput can be used with one or two hands, depending on screen size and user preference.
We conducted a longitudinal study with eight blind participants who were proficient in Braille, comparing one-handed Perkinput with iPhone's VoiceOver text entry method. We found that one-handed Perkinput was significantly faster and more accurate. A case study with one participant showed that with additional practice, our participant reached an average session speed of 17.56 words per minute (WPM) with one-handed entry and an error rate of just 0.14%. The same participant reached an average session speed of 38.0 WPM using two hands for entry on a tablet with 0.26% errors.
Smartphone Haptic Feedback for Nonvisual Wayfinding
Shiri Azenkot,
Richard Ladner, and
Jacob O. Wobbrock
We explore using vibration on a smartphone to provide turn-by-turn
walking instructions to people with visual impairments. We present
two novel feedback methods called Wand and ScreenEdge and
compare them to a third method called Pattern.
We built a prototype navigation system that uses each of the 3 feedback methods to provide turn-by-turn instructions and conducted a user study where 8 participants walked
along a pre-programmed route. With no audio feedback, participants interpreted the vibration feedback
with an average error rate of just 4 percent. Most preferred the
Pattern method, where patterns of vibrations indicate different
directions, or the ScreenEdge method, where areas of the screen
correspond to directions and touching them may induce vibration.
Enhancing Independence and Safety for Blind and Deaf-Blind
Public Transit Riders
Shiri Azenkot,
Sanjana Prasain,
Alan Borning,
Emily Fortuna,
Richard Ladner, and
Jacob O. Wobbrock
Blind and deaf-blind people often rely on public transit for everyday
mobility, but using transit can be challenging for them. We conducted
semi-structured interviews with 13 blind and deaf-blind people to understand
how they use public transit and what human values were important to them in
this domain. Two key values were identified: independence and safety.
We developed GoBraille, two related Braille-based applications that
provide information about buses and bus stops while supporting the key values.
GoBraille is built on MoBraille ("mobile Braille"), a novel framework that enables a Braille
display to benefit from many features in a smartphone without knowledge of
proprietary, device-specific protocols. To the best of our knowledge, this is
the first work in the HCI community to explore Braille-based applications.
Finally, we conducted user studies with blind people to demonstrate
that GoBraille enables people to travel more independently and
safely. We also conducted in-depth co-design with a deaf-blind person,
finding that a minimalist interface, with short input and output
messages, was most effective for this population.
Related Projects:
OneBusAway - improving public transit
usability
Press
Bus app for the blind deveoped at UW, King 5 News.
iWalk: a Navigation System for People with Low-Vision
Shiri Azenkot,
Amanda Stent,
and Benjamin Stern
iWalk is a prototype smart phone application that provides local business search and routing directions for people with low-vision. Related work on navigation and wayfinding applications has focused on physical sensors in the environment or special-purpose hardware. iWalk aims to demonstrate that applications on mainstream mobile phones, using remote services, are effective tools for people with visual impairments.
The iWalk interface is speech-based, with a high-contrast display, large fonts, and large buttons. The client is light weight and accesses remote services for speech recognition and synthesis, geocoding, reverse geocoding, and routing. iWalk provides turn-by-turn walking directions with non-verbal feedback (vibration or beeps) that signal upcoming turns. In the future, we hope to also incorporate public transit information and event search.
This project began when I was an intern at AT&T Labs in the summer of 2009.
Press
Inside the Labs: A Summer Intern Making a Difference - an article written about me and my project.
Refereed Conference Papers
Shiri Azenkot, Jacob O. Wobbrock, Sanjana Prasain, and Richard E. Ladner. 2012. Input Finger Detection for nonvisual touch screen text entry in Perkinput.
In Proceedings of Graphics Interface (GI '12). To appear.
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, New York, NY, USA, 3247-3256.
pdf
Shiri Azenkot, Theodore Golfinopolous, Adam Marcus, Alessondra Springmann, and Jonathan Varsanik 2011. Overcoming Barriers between Israeli and Palestinian
Students via Computer Science. In Proceedings of the 42nd SIGCSE technical symposium on computer science education (SIGCSE '11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 667-672.
pdf
Lydia B. Chilton, John J. Horton, Robert C. Miller, and Shiri Azenkot.
2010. Task search in a human computation market. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGKDD Workshop on Human Computation (HCOMP '10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1-9.
pdf
Refereed Conference Posters
Shiri Azenkot, Richard E. Ladner, and Jacob O. Wobbrock. 2011. Smartphone haptic feedback for nonvisual wayfinding. In The proceedings of the 13th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on computers and accessibility (ASSETS '11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 281-282.
pdf
Shiri Azenkot and Emily Fortuna. 2010. Improving public transit usability for blind and deaf-blind people by connecting a braille display to a smartphone. In Proceedings of the 12th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on computers and accessibility (ASSETS '10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 317-318.
*1st Place Winner at the Student Research Competition*
pdf
Amanda J. Stent, Shiri Azenkot, and Ben Stern. 2010. Iwalk: a lightweight navigation system for low-vision users. In Proceedings of the 12th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on computers and accessibility (ASSETS '10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 269-270.
pdf
I'm involved with several outreach efforts that try to increase diversity in computer science.
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