Collaborating with Community Members To Build Informed Tools For Accessibility

The drawn prototype for our project. By doing this by hand we could easily change things and make edits. This made collaboration easier.

The drawn prototype for our project. By doing this by hand we could easily change things and make edits. This made collaboration easier.

My INFO 200 class, the Principles of Information, provided me with my most informative and growth-oriented learning and leadership experiences at UW. In that class, we were tasked to create a product or service to help solve information problems for a community. My team worked to help people with degenerative eye conditions by creating a VR game that provides information and first-person tutorials on how to use aids such as visual aid canes and text readers. We wanted to help flatten the learning curve to keep these people safer and feel more confident in their abilities. This project allowed me the rewarding experience of working on a project that helps make the world more accessible and empower others. 

I am an empowerment engineer, meaning I work towards creating resources where people can feel empowered, and this project was one of those resources. I felt very fulfilled while working on this project because I was able to combine my passion for accessibility advocacy, human-centered design, and confidence-building. This project provided an opportunity to impact an underserved community in a positive way. My mission is to create resources that help improve historically underprivileged communities, and in my INFO 200 project, I worked towards that mission.

| Accomplishments

In my team, I took on the responsibility of being the project manager. My responsibilities were to organize and motivate my team, assign tasks, and oversee the completion of our VR game.

●       Created a project timeline to keep my team aware of deadlines, and the progress of our work which helped to hold people accountable for their work

●       Conducted research and ran 3 phone interviews with people in the community to be more informed about their struggles and how to help them

●       Crafted a mission statement to keep our work purposeful and mission-driven

●       Designed wireframes to visually organize our VR game

●       Made final edits to our project

●       Presented our project to our class

| Competencies Gained

Social justice

As my team was planning for our final project assignment, we brainstormed which community we wanted to help. We talked about our own identities to explore communities that were meaningful to us. The visually impaired community was chosen because one of my teammate’s father is legally blind because of a degenerative eye condition Retinitis Pigmentosa. I was aligned with this demographic as I am inspired by my own friends who have disabilities in my Special Olympics club. I have a strong value in advocating for accessibility for those with disabilities in order to create a more inclusive society, this value motivated me to work hard to create a tool that brings social justice to that community.

Other Perspectives

As we began to brainstorm how to help this community, we decided to conduct interviews with my teammate’s father, and people he knew that had the same condition. I lead 3 phone interviews, asking about what area of life their impairment affected the most, what problems they face, what solutions to those problems they have tried, and how they could be improved. It was very helpful for the success of our end product to gain the perspective of the people for whom we are trying to create solutions. This made me realize the importance of bringing in different perspectives into the creation process. After the interviews, my team and I decided to change our original solution to address the issues the community actually faced, not just what we assumed they needed. We continued to give the people we interviewed updates on our project and asked for their opinion throughout the process. This helped our project be more successful and relevant to the visually impaired community.

Vision

After talking with our target audience, the visually-impaired community, we began the process of creating a problem statement to help define our motivations and guide our work. We took many steps to come up with a thoughtful and informed vision. We first refined our focus-community to those who still had some vision because we found they do not get enough representation and have specific struggles. We then read articles and used the interviews we conducted to understand the specific problems they face, such as the increased risk of accidents due to loss of visual contrast, as well as emotional stress during the process of losing their sight. The culmination of our research helped inform our vision statement which was, “Building a technological resource for people currently dealing with degenerating vision that improves the emotional quality of life and safety through VR tutorials of visual aids to prepare the person for the progression of their condition.” We used this statement to direct our actions during the rest of the project.

Timesheet I created as the project manager for our team’s project. This helped our team to stay on track and keep members accountable for their work.

Timesheet I created as the project manager for our team’s project. This helped our team to stay on track and keep members accountable for their work.

Supervision

As we began the creation of our VR game, I took on the role of project manager. One of the most important responsibilities I had in that role was to supervise the work of my other teammates to make sure that we produced a high-quality project by the due date. The way I managed the work of my team was through creating a project timeline. I created an excel file with an estimated timeline of each part of the project, from user interviews at the beginning of the timeline, to the presentation at the end. I made sure to be clear about the expectations of work by assigning tasks to different members of the team and making it visually clear on the timeline. I would reach out for updates on the progress of each members’ task to see what areas needed more attention and extra help from other team members. This timeline helped my team stay organized, on schedule, and allowed us to put in the appropriate amount of effort into each part of the project without rushing at the last minute. In the end, we produced a high-quality project that garnered praise from our professor.

Problem Solving

After deciding on creating a VR game to help people who are visually impaired get used to aids needed during the progression of their condition, we ran into the problem what the project deliverable would actually be. While some of us had coding experience, no one in my group had the experience or the tools to make a complicated VR game. I came up with the idea of filming a video of what the actual gameplay would look like, and how the user uses VR to interact with the game levels, tutorials, and information. I utilized my skill of flexible thinking to solve our problems in a creative way. I think the skill of ideating creative solutions to problems is important for a leader in order to solve difficult problems that require complex solutions. I continue to use flexible thinking to problem solve in my role as an intern at a market research firm by creating a way to automate tasks such as quality checking open-ended responses through machine learning.

Excellence

The INFO 200 project was really inspiring to me and being able to do something for an underserved community motivated me to create the best product I could. I put extra effort into this project by spending over 9 hours total editing the video of our project, adding music, creating customized display text, syncing up the voice-over, and editing the video of the user playing the game with the actual gameplay. I wanted to make our video of the game look as real as possible in order to create the proper visual of what the game would actually be. I also created a thorough and engaging presentation to go along with the video for our project fair, in order to show the audience all of the thought, passion, and hard work we put into the project. All of my leadership acumen and efforts paid off in the end as we received an A for the project, personal praise from our professor, and a request to save our project as an example for future years.

Our final project. This video showcases the gameplay of our VR design plan. I edited the video clips, added animation, and sound to give the video a more realistic feel. The extra effort was worth it for our video was well received at the project fair where we presented our work.

| What I Have Learned

I continue to work for accessibility and empowerment for underserved communities through my leadership in Special Olympics, a club that promotes the inclusion of those with disabilities through sports. The most important thing that I learned during my INFO 200 project is to work with people and not for people and to help others without making assumptions. By using interviews for my project, I pulled from people’s experiences to inform our plans and actions. I do this now in my role of VP of Programing/Outreach for Special Olympics by sending feedback forms after practice to hear how the athletes felt about the intensity of the practice. This has helped me make fewer assumptions about other people and to be better informed.