Congratulations to Markus Wieland, Phillip Koch, and Michael Sedlmair! At the ACM Designing Interactive Systems 2026 (DIS 2026) conference, they won an Honorable Mention Award for their paper "The Ambivalent Experience of Eye Contact for People with Visual Impairments: Mechanisms and Design Challenges."
Abstract:
In mixed-ability collaboration, eye contact is often treated as a default cue for attention and turn-taking. As these signals are primarily visual, they are not reliably accessible to people with visual impairments. While prior work emphasized technical solutions, mechanism-level explanations of their experiences with sighted partners remain scarce. We interviewed 17 people with visual impairments about everyday interactions across work, education, and social settings. Using a critical-realist lens, we link events to plausible causal mechanisms and identify three recurring mechanisms: First, when gaze cannot allocate the floor, addressability hinges on explicit naming. Second, unclear speech entry cues and ongoing access work split attention and build fatigue, sometimes leading to withdrawal. Third, eye-contact norms can skew judgments of participation, prompting active management of visibility. We translate these mechanisms into five design challenges that reframe accessible eye contact as supporting configurable interaction contracts rather than merely making gaze visible.
About DIS 2026
Held in Singapore on June, 13–17, 2026, DIS 2026 challenged traditional human-computer interaction (HCI) models, and instead adopted an ecosystemic perspective by taking into account multifaceted sociotechnical, cultural, political, economic, and ethical aspects. This year, 248 full papers out of 1,154 submissions were accepted, resulting in an acceptance rate of 21%. Out of these accepted papers, 16 were selected for a Best Paper Award and 47 for an Honorable Mention.