2025 Theses Doctoral

Exploration for Equivalent Access to Interactive Digital Media

Nair, Vishnu

Digital media plays a significant role in our everyday lives, from education and work to entertainment and social interactions. Yet, with its increasing pervasiveness comes the added responsibility to ensure it is open and accessible to all. While there have been strides in making various forms of digital media accessible, the extent to which this access is truly equivalent is still questionable. For instance, the experiences of blind and low vision (BLV) users within various forms of media are heavily simplified, and their experiences are rarely comparable to that of their sighted counterparts. This raises a critical question: How can we provide more equivalent access to digital media?

This dissertation proposes facilitating exploration as a way to achieve more equivalent accessibility. By giving users the ability to freely experience spaces and media without excessive guidance and simplification, we can grant them a heightened sense of agency and fulfillment. Through this, we make accessibility not just about access to information but also about access to meaningful experiences.

I focus on BLV users' experiences within two forms of media: 3D video games and digital images. Within these contexts, I explore various techniques for facilitating exploration — designing tools, evaluating them with BLV users, and comparing them against existing tools to understand how exploration affects users' experiences. First, I present NavStick, a tool that enables self-directed information scanning, allowing BLV players to "look around" their immediate surroundings within a 3D game world. Second, I evaluate a range of spatial awareness tools (including NavStick) to assess how multimodal and complementary representations of information can promote environmental awareness for BLV players. Third, I introduce Surveyor, an in-game exploration assistance tool that scaffolds the exploration process in order to enhance discovery in BLV players. Finally, I present ImageAssist, a suite of tools that streamline the exploration of digital images through targeted scaffolding, helping users to more efficiently survey an image via touch on a touchscreen.

Across dozens of user study sessions, I found that when BLV users could explore more freely (rather than being limited to simplistic or guided interactions), they report a stronger sense of agency, a better understanding of the media, and more meaningful experiences. These tools supported users' core psychological needs — such as autonomy, competence, and learning — and consistently led to greater fulfillment and engagement. This dissertation shows how building interfaces around exploration can improve user experience, highlighting the importance of supporting exploration in interactive systems.