The challenges faced by individuals with visual impairments during severe weather events are poorly understood by the fields of risk communication and crisis informatics. To develop a stronger foundation for HCI research and design in this area, we conducted interviews with adults with varying forms of visual impairment about their recent experiences during weather emergencies and the role of digital technologies in supporting actions related to disaster preparedness and safety. We make three arguments to help orient future work. First, despite the challenges involved, efforts to improve risk communication for this audience must account for the social and infrastructural contexts that shape individuals' embodied experiences of severe weather. Furthermore, risk communication efforts must carefully balance interventions aimed at supporting recipient independence with collective or social strategies to support the goals of disability justice. Second, we suggest the potential for risk communications to nurture interdependent networks of information sharing and support. Finally, we identify the opportunity to reframe longstanding assumptions regarding the forms of uncertainty that designers should attend to as part of efforts to improve severe weather risk communication.
ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems