Location via proxy:   [ UP ]  
[Report a bug]   [Manage cookies]                
skip to main content
10.1145/3373625.3417023acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesassetsConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article
Open access

Disability and the COVID-19 Pandemic: Using Twitter to Understand Accessibility during Rapid Societal Transition

Published: 29 October 2020 Publication History

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced institutions to rapidly alter their behavior, which typically has disproportionate negative effects on people with disabilities as accessibility is overlooked. To investigate these issues, we analyzed Twitter data to examine accessibility problems surfaced by the crisis. We identified three key domains at the intersection of accessibility and technology: (i) the allocation of product delivery services, (ii) the transition to remote education, and (iii) the dissemination of public health information. We found that essential retailers expanded their high-risk customer shopping hours and pick-up and delivery services, but individuals with disabilities still lacked necessary access to goods and services. Long-experienced access barriers to online education were exacerbated by the abrupt transition of in-person to remote instruction. Finally, public health messaging has been inconsistent and inaccessible, which is unacceptable during a rapidly-evolving crisis. We argue that organizations should create flexible, accessible technology and policies in calm times to be adaptable in times of crisis to serve individuals with diverse needs.

Supplementary Material

a5-gleason-supplement (a5-gleason-supplement.pdf)
Terms for General and Domain Specific Searches

References

[1]
About IDEA: https://sites.ed.gov/idea/about-idea/. Accessed: 2020-05-07.
[2]
Al-Mouh Najd A.and Al-Khalifa, A.S. and A.-K.H.S. 2014. A First Look into MOOCs Accessibility. Computers Helping People with Special Needs (Cham, 2014), 145–152.
[3]
Alliance, G.D. 2020. GDA's Covid-Resilience Engagement and Response.
[4]
Anderson, M. and Perrin, A. 2017. Disabled Americans are less likely to use technology. Pew Research.
[5]
Auxier, B.E., Buntain, C.L., Jaeger, P., Golbeck, J. and Kacorri, H. 2019. #Handsoffmyada: A twitter response to the ada education and reform act. Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings. 620, (2019), 1–12.
[6]
Balani, S. and De Choudhury, M. 2015. Detecting and characterizing mental health related self-disclosure in social media. Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings. 18, (2015), 1373–1378.
[7]
Bigham, J.P., Kaminsky, R.S., Ladner, R.E., Danielsson, O.M. and Hempton, G.L. 2006. WebInSight: Making Web Images Accessible.
[8]
Blind Users Struggle with State Coronavirus Websites: 2020. https://themarkup.org/2020/04/21/blind-users-struggle-with-state-coronavirus-websites. Accessed: 2020-05-07.
[9]
Bohnsack, M. and Puhl, S. 2014. LNCS 8547 - Accessibility of MOOCs.
[10]
Borgos-Rodriguez, K., Ringland, K.E. and Piper, A.M. 2019. Myautsomefamilylife: Analyzing parents of children with developmental disabilities on YouTube. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction. 3, CSCW (2019).
[11]
Boyle, M. 2020. ‘It's Just Like Ticketmaster’: Playing the Delivery Slot Lottery During Covid-19. Bloomberg Business.
[12]
Brady, E. and Bigham, J.P. 2014. How companies engage customers around accessibility on social media. ASSETS14 - Proceedings of the 16th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility. (2014), 51–58.
[13]
Brewer, R. and Piper, A.M. 2016. “Tell it like it really is”: A case of online content creation and sharing among older adult bloggers. Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings. (2016), 5529–5542.
[14]
Brown, K. 2019. Court Says Domino's Pizza Website Must Be Accessible to the Blind. Courthouse News Service.
[15]
Bucher, A. 2018. Burger King Class Action Says Fast Food Chain's Website Violates ADA. Top Class Actions.
[16]
Burgstahler, S. 2009. Universal design in higher education: Promising practices. Seattle, WA: DO-IT, University of Washington. (2009).
[17]
Burke, L. and Crow, L. 2017. Bedding out: Art, activism, and Twitter. Disability and Social Media: Global perspectives (2017). (2017), 57–74.
[18]
Calle-Jimenez, T., Sanchez-Gordon, S. and Luján-Mora, S. 2014. Web accessibility evaluation of massive open online courses on Geographical Information Systems. IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference, EDUCON (Jul. 2014), 680–686.
[19]
Campbell, V.A., Gilyard, J.A., Sinclair, L., Sternberg, T. and Kailes, J.I. 2009. Preparing for and responding to pandemic influenza: Implications for people with disabilities. American Journal of Public Health. 99, SUPPL. 2 (2009), 294–300.
[20]
Cave, B. 2017. Online Retailers Beware: Court Holds Website Violates ADA Despite Lack of Physical Store. Lexology.
[21]
Chatterjee, R., Juvale, D. and Cherrez, N.J. 2017. A MOOC for U: The design of a MOOC based on Universal Design for Learning. Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference (2017), 143–148.
[22]
Cherniss, C., Extein, M., Goleman, D. and Weissberg, R.P. 2006. Emotional intelligence: what does the research really indicate? Educational psychologist. 41, 4 (2006), 239–245.
[23]
Cinquin Pierre-Antoineand Guitton, P. and S.H. 2018. Towards Truly Accessible MOOCs for Persons with Cognitive Disabilities: Design and Field Assessment. Computers Helping People with Special Needs (Cham, 2018), 146–153.
[24]
Comber, R., Hee-jeong Choi, J. and Hoonhout, J. 2014. Designing for Human-Food Interaction: an introduction to the special issue on “Food and Interaction Design.” International Journal of Human-Computer Studies. 72, 2 (2014), 181–184.
[25]
Coronavirus poses added challenges for hospital patients who are deaf or hard of hearing: 2020. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-04-16/coronavirus-deaf-hearing-hospitals-interpreters. Accessed: 2020-05-07.
[26]
Dailey, D. and Starbird, K. 2015. “It's raining dispersants”: Collective sensemaking of complex information in crisis contexts. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, CSCW. 2015-Janua, (2015), 155–158.
[27]
Demuth, J.L., Morss, R.E., Palen, L., Anderson, K.M., Anderson, J., Kogan, M., Stowe, K., Bica, M., Lazrus, H., Wilhelmi, O. and Henderson, J. 2018. “Sometimes da #beachlife ain't always da wave”: Understanding People's Evolving Hurricane Risk Communication, Risk Assessments, and Responses Using Twitter Narratives. Weather, Climate, and Society. 10, 3 (2018), 537–560.
[28]
DeVault, N. 2018. Home Delivery Services Serve Up Improved Accessibility to Food and More. AmeriDisability: America's Disability Community.
[29]
Dillahunt, T.R., Simioni, S. and Xu, X. 2019. Online grocery delivery services: An Opportunity to Address Food Disparities in Transportation-scarce Areas. Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings. (2019), 1–15.
[30]
Dobransky, K. and Hargittai, E. 2016. Unrealized potential: Exploring the digital disability divide. Poetics. 58, (2016), 18–28.
[31]
Dolmage, J.T. 2017. Academic ableism: Disability and higher education. University of Michigan Press.
[32]
Duplaga, M. 2017. Digital divide among people with disabilities: Analysis of data from a nationwide study for determinants of Internet use and activities performed online. PloS one. 12, 6 (2017).
[33]
Elias, M. 1997. The missing piece: Making the case for greater attention to social and emotional learning in the schools. Education Week. 17, 5 (1997), 36–38.
[34]
Elias, M.J. 2004. The connection between social-emotional learning and learning disabilities: Implications for intervention. Learning Disability Quarterly. 27, 1 (2004), 53–63.
[35]
Ferguson, A. 2016. The #CripTheVote Movement Is Bringing Disability Rights To The 2016 Election. Huff Post.
[36]
Feuston, J.L. and Piper, A.M. 2018. Beyond the coded gaze: Analyzing expression of mental health and illness on instagram. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction. 2, CSCW (2018).
[37]
Fuchs, E. and Strauss, C. 2012. Online Shopping Involving Consumers with Visual Impairments–A Qualitative Study. International Conference on Computers for Handicapped Persons (2012), 378–385.
[38]
George, A. and Keith, E.F. 2019. Disability Rights and Dignity in Disasters. Natural Resources & Environment. 34, 2 (2019), 53–55.
[39]
Gleason, C., Morris, M.R., Carrington, P., Kitani, K.M., Cassidy, C. and Bigham, J.P. 2019. “It's almost like they're trying to hide it": How user-provided image descriptions have failed to make twitter accessible. The Web Conference 2019 - Proceedings of the World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2019 (May 2019), 549–559.
[40]
Gleason, C., Pavel, A., McCamey, E., Low, C., Carrington, P., Kitani, K.M. and Bigham, J.P. 2020. Twitter A11y: A Browser Extension to Make Twitter Images Accessible. Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2020), 1–12.
[41]
Guan, X. and Chen, C. 2014. Using social media data to understand and assess disasters. Natural hazards. 74, 2 (2014), 837–850.
[42]
Guinness, D., Cutrell, E. and Morris, M.R. 2018. Caption crawler: Enabling reusable alternative text descriptions using reverse image search. Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2018), 1–11.
[43]
Hackett, S., Parmanto, B. and Zeng, X. 2004. Accessibility of Internet Websites Over Time. ASSETS 2004: the Sixth International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (2004), 32–39.
[44]
Hughes, A.L. and Palen, L. 2009. Twitter adoption and use in mass convergence and emergency events. ISCRAM 2009 - 6th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management: Boundary Spanning Initiatives and New Perspectives. 6, (2009), 248–260.
[45]
Huh, J., Liu, L.S., Neogi, T., Inkpen, K. and Pratt, W. 2014. Health vlogs as social support for chronic illness management. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction. 21, 4 (2014).
[46]
Iniesto, F. and Rodrigo, C. 2014. Accessibility assessment of MOOC platforms in Spanish: UNED COMA, COLMENIA and Miriada X. 2014 International Symposium on Computers in Education, SIIE 2014 (Jan. 2014), 169–172.
[47]
Kogan, M., Palen, L. and Anderson, K.M. 2015. Think local, retweet global: Retweeting by the geographically-vulnerable during hurricane sandy. CSCW 2015 - Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing. (2015), 981–993.
[48]
Lachlan, K.A., Spence, P.R., Lin, X. and Del Greco, M. 2014. Screaming into the wind: Examining the volume and content of tweets associated with Hurricane Sandy. Communication Studies. 65, 5 (2014), 500–518.
[49]
Lazar, J. 2011. Potential pricing discrimination due to inaccessible web sites. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics). 6946 LNCS, PART 1 (2011), 108–114.
[50]
Li, H., Bora, D., Salvi, S. and Brady, E. 2018. Slacktivists or activists?: Identity work in the virtual Disability March. Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings. 2018-April, (2018), 1–13.
[51]
Li, H. and Brady, E. 2016. Accessibilityfail: Categorizing shared photographs of physical accessibility problems. ASSETS 2016 - Proceedings of the 18th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility. (2016), 277–278.
[52]
Liu, L.S., Inkpen, K. and Pratt, W. 2015. “i'm not like my friends”: Understanding how children with a chronic illness use technology to maintain normalcy. CSCW 2015 - Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing. (2015), 1527–1539.
[53]
Manikonda, L. and De Choudhury, M. 2017. Modeling and understanding visual attributes of mental health disclosures in social media. Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings. 2017-May, (2017), 170–181.
[54]
Martin, H. 2018. Lawsuits targeting business websites over ADA violations are on the rise. Los Angeles Times.
[55]
Morris, J.T., Mueller, J.L. and Jones, M.L. 2014. Use of social media during public emergencies by people with disabilities. Western Journal of Emergency Medicine. 15, 5 (2014), 567–574.
[56]
Morris, M.R., Zolyomi, A., Yao, C., Bahram, S., Bigham, J.P. and Kane, S.K. 2016. “ With most of it being pictures now, I rarely use it ”: Understanding Twitter ’ s Evolving Accessibility to Blind Users. (2016), 5506–5516.
[57]
National Council On Interpreting in Helath Care: https://www.ncihc.org/. Accessed: 2020-05-07.
[58]
National Organisation on Disability 2005. Report on special needs assessment for Katrina evacuees (SNAKE) project. http://www.katrinadisability.info/PDFsK/katrina_snake_report.pdf.
[59]
Norton, J., Raturi, A., Nardi, B., Prost, S., McDonald, S., Pargman, D., Bates, O., Normark, M., Tomlinson, B., Herbig, N. and Dombrowski, L. 2017. A grand challenge for HCI: Food + sustainability. Interactions. (2017).
[60]
O'Brien, J. 2017. First-of-its-kind Trial Goes Plaintiff's Way; Winn-Dixie Must Update Website For The Blind. Forbes.
[61]
On The Pandemic: What The Coronavirus Outbreak Reveals About Ableism At Georgetown: 2020. https://georgetownvoice.com/2020/04/22/on-the-pandemic-what-the-coronavirus-outbreak-reveals-about-ableism-at-georgetown/.
[62]
Oswal, S.K. 2019. Disability, ICT and elearning platforms: Faculty-facing embedded work tools in learning management systems. ASSETS 2019 - 21st International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility. (2019), 105–111.
[63]
Palen, L. and Liu, S.B. 2007. Citizen Communications in Crisis: Anticipating a Future of ICT-Supported Public Participation. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (New York, NY, USA, 2007), 727–736.
[64]
Prieto, N. 2014. Home delivery services improve accessibility of food, medications, and medical care for people with transportation issues. EasterSeals Crossroads: taking on disability together.
[65]
Profita, H.P., Stangl, A., Matuszewska, L., Sky, S. and Kane, S.K. 2016. Nothing to hide: Aesthetic customization of hearing AIDS and cochlear implants in an online community. ASSETS 2016 - Proceedings of the 18th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility. (2016), 219–227.
[66]
Roberts, J.B., Crittenden, L.A. and Crittenden, J.C. 2011. Students with disabilities and online learning: A cross-institutional study of perceived satisfaction with accessibility compliance and services. Internet and Higher Education. 14, 4 (2011), 242–250.
[67]
Ryan, F. and Marsh, S. 2020. Disabled people cut off from vital supplies due to panic buying. The Guardian.
[68]
Sanchez-Gordon, S. and Luján-Mora, S. How Could MOOCs Become Accessible? The Case of edX and the Future of Inclusive Online Learning.
[69]
Scholz, F., Yalcin, B. and Priestley, M. 2017. Internet access for disabled people: Understanding socio-relational factors in Europe. Cyberpsychology: Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberpspace. 11, 1 (2017).
[70]
Schraefel, M.C. 2013. Green food through green food: A human centered design approach to green food technology. UbiComp 2013 Adjunct - Adjunct Publication of the 2013 ACM Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (2013), 595–598.
[71]
Seale, J. and Cooper, M. 2010. E-learning and accessibility: An exploration of the potential role of generic pedagogical tools. Computers and Education. 54, 4 (2010), 1107–1116.
[72]
Secretary DeVos Reiterates Learning Must Continue for All Students, Declines to Seek Congressional Waivers to FAPE, LRE Requirements of IDEA: 2020. https://www.newsbreak.com/news/1555578539187/secretary-devos-reiterates-learning-must-continue-for-all-students-declines-to-seek-congressional-waivers-to-fape-lre-requirements-of-idea.
[73]
Shinohara, K., Kawas, S., Ko, A.J. and Ladner, R.E. 2018. Who teaches accessibility? A survey of U.S. computing faculty. SIGCSE 2018 - Proceedings of the 49th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (Feb. 2018), 197–202.
[74]
Social-Emotional Learning should be priority during COVID-19 crisis: 2020. http://neatoday.org/2020/04/15/social-emotional-learning-during-covid/.
[75]
Sohaib, O. and Kang, K. 2017. E-commerce web accessibility for people with disabilities. Complexity in Information Systems Development. Springer. 87–100.
[76]
Speech Reading: https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/hearingloss/parentsguide/building/speech-reading.html. Accessed: 2020-05-07.
[77]
Storer, K.M. and Branham, S.M. 2019. “That's the way sighted people do it”: What blind parents can teach technology designers about co-reading with children. DIS 2019 - Proceedings of the 2019 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference. (2019), 385–398.
[78]
Takayama, K. 2017. Disaster Relief and Crisis Intervention with Deaf Communities: Lessons Learned from the Japanese Deaf Community. Journal of Social Work in Disability and Rehabilitation. 16, 3–4 (2017), 247–260.
[79]
Vieweg, S. and Starbird, K. 2010. Microblogging in Mass Emergency. Distribution (2010), 1–4.
[80]
When Coronavirus Care Gets Lost in Translation: 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/17/health/covid-coronavirus-medical-translators.html. Accessed: 2020-05-07.
[81]
White, B. 2014. Disaster Relief for Deaf Persons: Lessons from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Review of Disability Studies: An International Journal. 2, 3 (2014).

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Please Understand My Disability: An Analysis of YouTubers' Discourse on Disability ChallengesProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36869468:CSCW2(1-25)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
  • (2024)“Vulnerable, Victimized, and Objectified”: Understanding Ableist Hate and Harassment Experienced by Disabled Content Creators on Social MediaProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3641949(1-19)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • (2024)Isolated Arabic Sign Language Recognition Using a Transformer-based Model and Landmark KeypointsACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing10.1145/358498423:1(1-19)Online publication date: 15-Jan-2024
  • Show More Cited By

Index Terms

  1. Disability and the COVID-19 Pandemic: Using Twitter to Understand Accessibility during Rapid Societal Transition
        Index terms have been assigned to the content through auto-classification.

        Recommendations

        Comments

        Information & Contributors

        Information

        Published In

        cover image ACM Conferences
        ASSETS '20: Proceedings of the 22nd International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility
        October 2020
        764 pages
        ISBN:9781450371032
        DOI:10.1145/3373625
        This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License.

        Sponsors

        Publisher

        Association for Computing Machinery

        New York, NY, United States

        Publication History

        Published: 29 October 2020

        Check for updates

        Author Tags

        1. Accessibility
        2. COVID-19
        3. Delivery Services
        4. Disability
        5. Emergency
        6. Online Education
        7. Public Health
        8. Social Media
        9. Twitter

        Qualifiers

        • Research-article
        • Research
        • Refereed limited

        Funding Sources

        • National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship
        • National Institute on Disability, Independent Living and RehabilitationResearch (NIDILRR)

        Conference

        ASSETS '20
        Sponsor:

        Acceptance Rates

        ASSETS '20 Paper Acceptance Rate 46 of 167 submissions, 28%;
        Overall Acceptance Rate 436 of 1,556 submissions, 28%

        Contributors

        Other Metrics

        Bibliometrics & Citations

        Bibliometrics

        Article Metrics

        • Downloads (Last 12 months)1,582
        • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)202
        Reflects downloads up to 13 Jan 2025

        Other Metrics

        Citations

        Cited By

        View all
        • (2024)Please Understand My Disability: An Analysis of YouTubers' Discourse on Disability ChallengesProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36869468:CSCW2(1-25)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
        • (2024)“Vulnerable, Victimized, and Objectified”: Understanding Ableist Hate and Harassment Experienced by Disabled Content Creators on Social MediaProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3641949(1-19)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
        • (2024)Isolated Arabic Sign Language Recognition Using a Transformer-based Model and Landmark KeypointsACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing10.1145/358498423:1(1-19)Online publication date: 15-Jan-2024
        • (2024)Examining the differences of perceptions and experience with online health information accessibility between deaf and hearing individuals: A qualitative studyPatient Education and Counseling10.1016/j.pec.2024.108169122(108169)Online publication date: May-2024
        • (2024)Providing accessible health information for people with disability in a public health crisis: A qualitative study of the experiences of Australian accessible information provider organizations during the COVID-19 pandemicDisability and Health Journal10.1016/j.dhjo.2024.101720(101720)Online publication date: Oct-2024
        • (2024)Impact of COVID-19 in the web accessibility of higher education institutions: a pending challengeUniversal Access in the Information Society10.1007/s10209-024-01149-4Online publication date: 17-Sep-2024
        • (2023)The Shifting Landscape of Digital Accessibility for Students With Visual Impairments in K-12 SchoolsCases on Effective Universal Design for Learning Implementation Across Schools10.4018/978-1-6684-4750-5.ch009(219-252)Online publication date: 24-Nov-2023
        • (2023)Humans, robots and artificial intelligences reconfiguring urban life in a crisisFrontiers in Sustainable Cities10.3389/frsc.2023.10818215Online publication date: 5-Apr-2023
        • (2023)Mixed Abilities and Varied Experiences: A Group Autoethnography of a Virtual Summer InternshipCommunications of the ACM10.1145/360462266:8(105-113)Online publication date: 25-Jul-2023
        • (2023)The Accessibility of Data Visualizations on the Web for Screen Reader Users: Practices and Experiences During COVID-19ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing10.1145/355789916:1(1-29)Online publication date: 29-Mar-2023
        • Show More Cited By

        View Options

        View options

        PDF

        View or Download as a PDF file.

        PDF

        eReader

        View online with eReader.

        eReader

        HTML Format

        View this article in HTML Format.

        HTML Format

        Login options

        Media

        Figures

        Other

        Tables

        Share

        Share

        Share this Publication link

        Share on social media