Robinson-Moore, W.J. – VEMI Lab /vemi 91±¬ÁÏ Wed, 04 Mar 2026 17:58:10 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.8.5 Toward Accessible Parsons Problems on Mobile Platforms /vemi/publication/toward-accessible-parsons-problems-on-mobile-platforms/ Tue, 17 Feb 2026 17:38:58 +0000 /vemi/?post_type=publication&p=5461
Parsons problems have become a mainstay of computer science education. They are heavily used among students, especially in K-12 and provide a small puzzle-like experience for students to practice their skills. Today, while prior work has explored complex issues with accessibility and block languages in general, the 2024 changes to accessibility regulations by the U.S. Department of Justice includes new rules around mobile platforms. These rules are ill-defined and in need of evaluation. In this work, we make several contributions. First, we conducted an evaluation of existing blocks with respect to their regulatory compliance and discuss a new blocks technology that we developed that meets these new mobile guidelines. Second, we conducted three empirical studies using Parsons problems to evaluate the usability of the technology with teachers of the visually impaired (n = 32), high-school students with diverse disabilities (n = 28), and high-school students with blindness or low vision (n = 13).
Citation:
Kluthe, T., Contreras, G., Allee, W., Robinson-Moore, W.J., Roy, N., Williams, H., Hoffman, A., Smith, D.W., Blaser, B., Gorlewicz, J.L., Giudice, N.A.,  & Stefik, A. (2026).  Toward Accessible Parsons Problems on Mobile Platforms. In the Proceedings of the 57th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSETS’26). Vol 1, 589-596. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA. https://doi.org/10.1145/3770762.3772646.
]]> Spatial audio-enhanced multimodal graph rendering for efficient data trend learning on touchscreen devices /vemi/publication/spatial-audio-enhanced-multimodal-graph-rendering-for-efficient-data-trend-learning-on-touchscreen-devices/ Sat, 11 May 2024 15:53:32 +0000 /vemi/?post_type=publication&p=5449
Touchscreen-based rendering of graphics using vibrations, sonification, and text-to-speech is a promising approach for nonvisual access to graphical information, but extracting trends from complex data representations nonvisually is challenging. This work presents the design of a multimodal feedback scheme with integrated spatial audio for the exploration of histograms and scatter plots on touchscreens. We detail the hardware employed and the algorithms used to control vibrations and sonification adjustments through the change of pitch and directional stereo output. We conducted formative testing with 5 blind or visually impaired participants, and results illustrate that spatial audio has the potential to increase the identification of trends in the data, at the expense of a skewed mental representation of the graph. This design work and pilot study are critical to the iterative, human-centered approach of rendering multimodal graphics on touchscreens and contribute a new scheme for efficiently capturing data trends in complex data representations.
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Robinson-Moore, W. Kalal, M., Tennison, J.L., Giudice, N.A., & Gorlewicz, J.L. (2024). Spatial audio-enhanced multimodal graph rendering for efficient data trend learning on touchscreen devices. Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’24). DOI: 10.1145/3613904.3641959.
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