Adding Voices to Support Web Navigation Among a Low Digital Literacy Group
Published in Designing Interactive Systems (DIS), 2019
Recommended citation: Gautam, A., Tatar, D., & Harrison, S. (2019). Adding Voices to Support Web Navigation Among a Low Digital Literacy Group. In Companion Publication of the 2019 on Designing Interactive Systems Conference 2019 Companion (pp. 165-169). http://aakash.xyz/files/dis2019a.pdf
This paper presents our initial experiences introducing and refining a voice-annotated web application to a group of people who have limited experience with technology. We conducted a two-week training program for a group of sex-trafficking survivors in Nepal to help them sell their handicrafts on an online marketplace. We incorporate voices in two senses: by providing naturalistic, extended voice annotation with colloquial phrasing and intonation and by using the survivors’ words and images in the interface. The colloquial phrases helped in use and we saw the survivors adopting the phrases to explain the system. We contemplate design approaches to make web applications accessible to people with limited digital fluency.