Co-Designing Multimodal Systems for Accessible Asynchronous Dance Instruction

TL;DR

To inform accessible asynchronous dance instruction systems, participants designed 8 systems revealing common themes: staged learning to dissect routines, crafting vocabularies for movements, and selectively using modalities (narration for movement structure, sound for expression, and haptics for spatial cues).

Abstract

Videos make exercise instruction widely available, but they rely on visual demonstrations that blind and low vision (BLV) learners cannot see. While audio descriptions (AD) can make videos accessible, describing movements remains challenging as the AD must convey what to do (mechanics, location, orientation) and how to do it (speed, fluidity, timing). Prior work thus used multimodal instruction to support BLV learners with individual simple movements. However, it is unclear how these approaches scale to dance instruction with unique, complex movements and precise timing constraints. To inform accessible asynchronous dance instruction systems, we conducted three co-design workshops (N=28) with BLV dancers, instructors, and experts in sound, haptics, and AD. Participants designed 8 systems revealing common themes: staged learning to dissect routines, crafting vocabularies for movements, and selectively using modalities (narration for movement structure, sound for expression, and haptics for spatial cues). We conclude with design implications to make learning dance accessible.

Figures (7)

• Figure 1: Our co-design workshops featured 4 major phases. The participants were informed of the workshop goals and their task (Introduction), then they split into smaller groups to teach the dance clips to one another (Teaching), design a system to effectively teach the clip using what they learned from teaching one another (Designing) and then shared their systems with all the other groups (Presentation).
• Figure 2: Each individual workshop followed a five-stage process: 1) pre-workshop survey, 2) co-design workshop introduction, 3) teaching, 4) designing, and 5) presenting.
• Figure 3: We provided participants with an accessible soundboard application and voice recorders, configurable 3D models, and tactile stickers that participants used to embody haptic device placements.
• Figure 4: Participants using tactile stickers to mimic haptic device placement (A), voice recorders to record verbal descriptions and sound cues from the soundboard (B), and the 3D models to learn poses (C).
• Figure 5: Participants presenting their tutorial systems during the last stage of the workshop by physically demonstrating haptic cues (A) and verbal narration and sounds (B and C).