Sight unseen
A question guiding technology designers—especially in the age of generative artificialintelligence—is whether their products and services are accessible to all.
Jonathan Zong has a bigger question: Is access enough?
Zong, an assistant professor of information science, has worked with blind and low-vision people to understand how technology can benefit them, as well as the limitations they face in trying to use it. It’s why the work he did as a PhD student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology is such a point of pride for him.
Jonathan Zong is trying to help designers think about how blind and low-vision people interact with technology—including challenging the idea that access alone is a sufficient goal. Photo by Kimberly Coffin.
“We did all this work to create better, more accessible interfaces for data—but then we asked people why they felt it was important to have access to this data,” he said. “And we heard a lot about agency—people being participatory, as opposed to depending on others to do the analysis for them.”
That was when Zong began to think about how to shift power in ways that invite more people to participate in knowledge creation.
“That project turned into finding ways to not prioritize the visual output—so rather than first designing visualization, then making it accessible, we treated visualization as just one output,” he said.
He experimented with presenting data through text, nonspeech audio and tactile charts, allowing those who are blind or have low vision to interpret data without an intermediary.
Zong is a computer scientist and a visual artistwho brings those different perspectives to bear in reimagining sociotechnical systems, such as large technology platforms, which he fears have created small, massively influential groups of people that decide what technologies should be put into society. It’s work he continues as founder of the Data and Design Group at the college.
“We need to be preparing the next generation ofengineers and designers to think in these modes ofthe social and technical.”
Jonathan Zong, assistant professor, information science
“We shouldn’t just be asking how things work, but thinking about their effects on society,” he said. “Are we creating equitable spaces online where everyone is invited to participate equally? Or are we serving the very few at the expense of public interest?”
His focus on including people with disabilities into conversations around data, access and agency started during the COVID-19 pandemic, when elected leaders and health agencies used visualizations to share information about infections, hospitalizations, mortality and vaccinations.
“These graphics were telling really important stories in the public discourse, like flattening the curve,” Zong said. “And there weren’t always good alternatives. Think about describing a chart to someone: You might not capture the important takeaways of how that person might make better decisions.”
A.I. as a game changer
While his work has brought attention to the lack of agency many blind or low-vision people feel on a visual internet, generative A.I. has the potential to change how these users experience information online, such as automatically describing an image when a sighted person isn’t available.
“But they’re also aware of the downsides—that people don’t upload image descriptions, that the A.I. will make mistakes, that A.I. descriptions can be really biased,” Zong said. “And again, there’s that loss of agency, because now they’re reliant on a fallible A.I. to bethe interpreter.”
That critical perspective on technology’s potential is why he was excited to arrive at CMDI’s information science department, which is positioned at the intersection of computer science, the humanities and social sciences. Increasingly, design is being recognized as an important discipline for thinking through these problems.
That multidisciplinary viewpoint is crucial to reimagining technology as a force that works for people.
“We need to be preparing the next generation ofengineers and designers to think in these modes ofthe social and technical,” Zong said. “Thinking about design as a way to intervene in situations and create better alternatives is really important to me as both a researcher and an educator.”
Joe Arney covers research and general news for the college.