CodeWalk: Facilitating Shared Awareness in Mixed-Ability Collaborative Software Development

COVID-19 accelerated the trend toward remote software development, increasing the need for tightly-coupled synchronous collaboration. Existing tools and practices impose high coordination overhead on blind or visually impaired (BVI) developers, impeding their abilities to collaborate effectively, compromising their agency, and limiting their contribution. To make remote collaboration more accessible, we created CodeWalk, a set of features added to Microsoft's Live Share VS Code extension, for synchronous code review and refactoring. We chose design criteria to ease the coordination burden felt by BVI developers by conveying sighted colleagues' navigation and edit actions via sound effects and speech. We evaluated our design in a within-subjects experiment with 10 BVI developers. Our results show that CodeWalk streamlines the dialogue required to refer to shared workspace locations, enabling participants to spend more time contributing to coding tasks. This design offers a path towards enabling BVI and sighted developers to collaborate on more equal terms. © 2022 ACM.

Mixed Abilities and Varied Experiences: A group autoethnography of a virtual summer internship

The COVID-19 pandemic forced many people to convert their daily work lives to a "virtual"format where everyone connected remotely from their home. In this new, virtual environment, accessibility barriers changed, in some respects for the better (e.g., more flexibility) and in other aspects, for the worse (e.g., problems including American Sign Language interpreters over video calls). Microsoft Research held its first cohort of all virtual interns in 2020. We the authors, full time and intern members and affiliates of the Ability Team, a research team focused on accessibility, reflect on our virtual work experiences as a team consisting of members with a variety of abilities, positions, and seniority during the summer intern season. Through our autoethnographic method, we provide a nuanced view into the experiences of a mixed-ability, virtual team, and how the virtual setting affected the team's accessibility. We then reflect on these experiences, noting the successful strategies we used to promote access and the areas in which we could have further improved access. Finally, we present guidelines for future virtual mixed-ability teams looking to improve access. © 2021 ACM.