I assisted the research of UMBC’s HCC department by partaking in tasks such as analyzing qualitative data taken from interviews. This research is focused on voice activated personal assistants and accessibility tools by looking at the various needs of different disabilities. From our findings we created a paper entitled, “Designing Intersectionally: Exploring Accessible Navigation that Accounts for Intersectional Identities.” This paper discusses the intersectionality of various disabilities with qualitative data gathered from individual interviews. My contributions to this paper was assisting with interviews, quality checks of digital transcriptions, thematic coding of interviews, consolidation of data, and designing graphics to encapsulate the findings of our research.
For this research, I was given the opportunity to create meaningful icons for each of the disabilities. With the consideration of the requirements, the context of our research, and avoiding common stereotypes I was able to design these icons.
The graphic on the right, intersectionality of the disabilities, is to symbolize the ways that people with multiple disabilities overlap. This graphic is used in the paper to describe the way that disabilities overlap. People of various disabilities, some having more than others, have both similar and different experiences from others with different disabilities.
