Foundations and affordances of workplace assistive technology: The case of mobile and enabling IT for workers with visual impairments

Smartphones, with their built-in cameras, speech synthesizers, processing power, sensors, and network connectivity have established themselves as a fertile and ubiquitous platform for software developers interested in augmenting the capabilities of users with visual impairments. When fitted with readily available nonvisual apps, they comprise a mobile and enabling IT bundle (ME-IT) which can afford users new capabilities to interact with visual aspects of their environment. In this study, we investigated the potential of ME-IT as a workplace enabler for workers with visual impairments (WVI). Adopting a Delphi approach, this study contributes five categories of extended capabilities afforded by ME-IT deemed highly relevant to WVI and their employers: reading text on the fly, understanding the visual properties of people and things in the workplace, orienting to the physical features of one's work environment, tagging objects in one's work environment, and locating things in the work environment. Two characteristics of the ME-IT bundle emerged as the basis for these extended capabilities: portable computer vision and context awareness. Findings extend literature on the use of mobile technology in the workplace, contextually aware computing, and assistive technology, and invites additional work to calibrate ME-IT to specific jobs, job contexts, and the needs of users.