Shaomei Wu
AImpower.org, Mountain View, California, United States
Existing videoconferencing (VC) technologies are often optimized for productivity and efficiency, with little support for the "soft side" of VC meetings such as empathy, authenticity, belonging, and emotional connections. This paper presents findings from a 15-month long autoethnographic study of VC experiences by the first author, a person who stutters (PWS). Our research shed light on the hidden costs of VC for PWS, uncovering the substantial emotional and cognitive efforts that other meeting attendants are often unaware of. Recognizing the disproportionate burden on PWS to be heard in VC, we propose a set of design implications for a more inclusive communication environment, advocating for shared responsibility among all, including communication technologies, to ensure the inclusion and respect of every voice.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642746
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2024.acm.org/)