YouTube Videos as Data: Seeing Daily Challenges for People with Visual Impairments During COVID-19

Abstract

COVID-19 pandemic has spread globally and affected a large number of people. Previous studies collected online survey and interview data to raise awareness of requirements from people with visual impairments (PVI) under the COVID-19 pandemic, however, little has been observed in PVI’s daily activities due to the suspension of face-to-face fieldwork. In this study, we utilized an innovative data source – YouTube videos to fill the vacancy of observation data in this specific topic. Compared to previous studies, we got more voices involved and gained a richer dataset by considering both videos from the visually impaired community where PVI are primary authors and news media videos where PVI are involved as active participants. Eventually, we collected 24 videos created by the visually impaired community and 27 videos from the news media community, where 57 PVI were depicted. This study uncovered the problems causing pandemic-related challenges and suggested the need for explicit guidelines that can make the prevention protocols accessible and inclusive for PVI, as this study indicates that accessibility can be easily missed under unforeseen situations like the COVID-19 pandemic.

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