Honorable Mention
Despite recent improvements in online accessibility, the Internet remains an inhospitable place for users with photosensitive epilepsy, a chronic condition in which certain light stimuli can trigger seizures and even lead to death. In this paper, we explore how current risk detection systems have allowed attackers to take advantage of design oversights and target vulnerable users with photosensitivity on popular social media platforms. Through interviews with photosensitive individuals and a critical review of existing systems, we construct design requirements for consumer-driven protective systems and developed a prototype browser extension for actively detecting and disarming potentially seizure-inducing GIFs. We validate our system with a comprehensive dataset of simulated and collected GIFs. Finally, we conduct a novel quantitative analysis of the prevalence of seizure-inducing GIFs across popular social media platforms and contribute recommendations for improving online accessibility for individuals with photosensitivity. All study materials are available at https://osf.io/5a3dy/.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445510
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2021.acm.org/)