“Goodnight Alexa” – Theorising interactions between people with visual impairments and digital voice assistants.

Visually impaired individuals face various physical, digital, and social challenges. While specialised technologies such as screen readers can mitigate some of these challenges, they are associated with unresolved dilemmas including stigma. Digital voice assistants, which were not intentionally developed for people with visual impairments, have a large potential to offer desirable benefits without a negative stereotype. Yet, there is a lack of knowledge of how people with visual impairments perceive this technology, how they interact with it, for which tasks they use it and what are the respective outcomes. To address these questions, we conducted a qualitative study and interviewed 21 people with visual impairments who use digital voice assistants. Relying on a sociotechnical perspective and the concept of IS delegation, we identified six different roles of voice assistants that differ based on their agentic capabilities, their delegation mechanisms, the tasks they execute, and the associated instrumental or humanistic outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]