Introductions

Our goal for this project is to design a useful device for someone with a disability. The first step would be to interview our client so we can have a good idea of what challenges he faces and what things he would find useful for his everyday life. On Tuesday, November 1st, our team (Sarah, Freda, Jonathan) met with Bill, who has achromatopsia, so he is legally blind and 80% color blind.

Agenda

Intro:

  • Name
  • Where you are from
  • Something that reflects personal values
  • Interests
  • How long have you been in PA
  • Talk a little about our past projects (project 2)
  • What drew you to participate in this project? How did you hear about this project?
  • Is it ok to record this?

Clarify scope and expectations:

  • We are not professional developers
  • Not making something to be commercially sold
  • Our goal is to make a gadget that is helpful for you
  • Go over our timeline
  • Ask if there are any questions/confusion

Questions:

  • What do you struggle with in everyday life
  • Is there anything you wish was easier to do that you have challenges with
  • Was there anything that you haven’t been able to do that we could potentially create something for
  • Do you have challenges with running (His sport)
  • Ask follow up questions as we go on his responses
  • Write down ideas 

Conclude:

  • Thank him for his time

 

Summary and Major Takeaways

Notes/Ideation during meeting

Due to Bill’s achromatopsia he has a lot of trouble distinguishing between colors. Especially blue and white, red and black, and green in general. This causes some challenges when navigating through websites as some functions such as embedded links will be blue on white. The first time he uses a website, he clicks on all the links he can find by seeing when the mouse cursor changes into a hand symbol, and memorizes where on the website it is and where the link leads. Of course, this method may miss some links if the area to click on is small and the cursor doesn’t change. Therefore, we thought it would be useful for Bill if we could make a gadget that checks for the presence of embedded link on the website and locates where they are.

Link Detector (ideation after meeting)

For the same reason, he finds it hard to pick matching clothes in the morning. He mainly guesses the color of the clothing from his past experiences and what colors are more likely to occur in clothing, but sometimes he ends up with mismatching colors, which he finds embarrassing. Therefore, we wanted to address these two points of struggle by creating a gadget that detects and prints out the color of the clothing using a sensor and colors on the website using a computer app. 

Color Reader (ideation after meeting)

Lastly, when Bill cooks on his own, he cannot tell when meat is fully cooked, so he usually ends up burning the food. He tried to use a thermometer but found it to be inconsistent. Using a timer wasn’t too helpful either because timing depended on the type and shape of ingredients and the strength of the heat.

Notes/Ideation during meeting

We found this one to be challenging because Bill has already tried to problem solve and they did not help him at all. So, we ended up with a less feasible idea of using machine learning and training a model to identify if the food is done or not.

Helpful Cook (ideation after meeting)

 

Reflection

Zoom meeting with Bill ( with audio connection only)

Overall we thought the meeting went successful. Bill was a very nice and active guy. He was open to any and all ideas we had and from what we understand just wanted to see how this process is so he can recommend other people in future years for this class. His main goal in participating in the project was to get disability awareness more widespread and help the younger generation in seeing that people with disabilities are no different from everybody else more so than anything else.

Our first challenge was we were originally planning to do drawings on Zoom, but since he called in on a phone instead of a computer, he wasn’t able to see the zoom so we couldn’t show him any drawings or images. If we were able to change anything about this meeting (and for future meetings), we would have liked it to be in person so we could draw together and receive more immediate feedback vs just based on what he says/describes. However, at the moment Zoom was the best solution since Bill was helping other people with their meetings. 

Our second challenge was that Bill is very high-functioning in his everyday life. He lives by himself, works helping others with disabilities, cooks for himself…etc. This made it difficult to find things he struggled with day to day. He was born with this vision, so he had learned what issues he could work around. After our meeting the only solutions we could come up with were issues related to how he couldn’t see colors. However, we think the ideation has enough variation in what kinds of color-related issues it addresses. Overall, we were able to know a lot more about Bill through our meeting, and hopefully, he will find the gadget we create to be helpful.