Cooking is an essential task that people frequently perform in their daily lives to prepare foods for sustenance, and is a major contributor to improved quality of life. Prior to the cooking process itself, obtaining and preparing ingredients, navigating a kitchen, learning cooking terms, and understanding how to use tools are all necessary skills for a home cook to learn. Recipes play an essential role in this learning process, as they provide guidance for each step of preparing a dish. However, most recipes, especially in digital formats, contain an abundance of visual information without non-visual alternatives. This reliance on visual communication leads to barriers for blind cooks. Therefore, it is important to explore the information need of blind cooks, their interactions with information while cooking, and how recipes and technology should be designed to not solely rely on visual delivery of information.

Toward this goal, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 visually-impaired home cooks and 4 cooking instructors at Saavi Services for the Blind, a blindness rehabilitation training center providing life skills training using non-visual techniques. We found that the cooking process of visually-impaired home cooks consists of 5 stages: information searching and comparison, information extraction and manipulation, learning and ideation through information, information interaction, and information identification. In this work, we explore how blind cooks interact with information throughout each stage of cooking that we identified. Furthermore, we uncover unique findings of existing methods, strategies, and challenges in accessing information while cooking (e.g., tracking specific steps while cooking) and present the information need for cooking activities (e.g., tolerance on timing for cooking steps). We also contributed 6 design features for technology aiming to deliver information to visually-impaired people while cooking (e.g., restricted gestures for interaction). Overall, our findings provide a roadmap of information access for people with vision impairments throughout different cooking stages.

59 pages

Thesis Committee:
Patrick Carrington (Chair)
Jeffrey Bigham

Srinivasan Seshan, Head, Computer Science Department
Martial Hebert, Dean, School of Computer Science

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