The paper “Promoting Self-Efficacy Through an Effective Human-Powered Nonvisual Smartphone Task Assistant”, co-authored by LASIGE’s integrated researchers, André Rodrigues and Tiago Guerreiro, and André Santos, LASIGE’s research engineer, has been accepted for presentation and publication as part of the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (CSCW21), a top-ranked publication (ranked #9 in the Google Scholar Human-Computer Interaction). The paper is also co-authored by Kyle Montague at the Northumbria University.
In the paper the authors present a human-powered task assistance for smartphones that enables sighted people, with no accessibility knowledge, to contribute to the creation of effective assistance by providing tasks demonstrations. The work focuses on exploring the effects of pervasive and effective assistance on blind users’ perceptions of self-efficacy. Learning and mastering a new technology is not just about if the user can or cannot. More importantly, is if the user believes he can or not. These perceptions determine how users behave and how much effort they are willing to put in to master new technologies.
The results of a user study with 13 sighted participants and 16 blind users revealed that the systemic support provided was not only effective (73% success against 10%) in supporting task completion, but it also positively affected users’ perceptions of self-efficacy.