Visual assistance technologies provide people who are blind access to visual information about their surroundings, enabling greater independence when shopping, cooking, reading mail, determining what to wear, and navigating. All the while, people who use visual assistance technologies commonly share images and videos that contain private visual information, e.g. credit card numbers and medical information; roughly half of these disclosures arise because people make the trade-off to compromise their privacy to learn about the content depicted in their images. In other cases, private visual information is shared inadvertently because a person cannot independently inspect their photos for possible privacy leaks. In this talk, I will present my work focused on safeguarding the privacy of people who are blind in the context of visual assistance technologies and discuss the implications of this work for anybody who takes and share visual information. I will also situate my efforts to “Safeguard Private Visual Information”, as part of my efforts to develop accurate and context-aware image descriptions and to cultivate cultures of inclusive tactile media design and production.
This seminar is co-organized with UW CREATE.
Dr. Abigale Stangl is an interdisciplinary researcher working at the intersection of accessibility and human-computer interaction. Her work is motivated by the goal of achieving fair information access and reducing the social and technical factors that exclude people with disabilities from developing critical media and information literacies. She achieves this by conducting ethnographic and participatory design research, and her work has contributed to the development of computer vision datasets, the design of multimodal interfaces, and visual and tactile literacy curricula. Dr. Stangl received her Ph.D. from the ATLAS Institute at the University of Colorado in 2019 (advised by Dr. Tom Yeh), has a Masters in Information Communication Technology, and a Bachelors of Environmental Design and Planning. She is the recipient of a Rotary International Ambassadorial Scholarship for her work at the intersection of architecture and social justice (2010), a Bullard Postdoctoral Fellowship from the School of Information at the University of Texas which supported her work with Dr. Danna Gurari (2019-2020), and a 2020 Computing Innovation Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Computing Research Association to work with Dr. Leah Findlater at the University of Washington.