Towards Accessible Voice Assistants: A Document Analysis of Commercial Voice Design Guidelines

Abstract

Voice-Activated Personal Assistants (VAPAs) like Amazon's Alexa and Google Assistant have rapidly become pervasive. They have proven to be particularly valuable to people with disabilities, chiefly among individuals with visual impairments. However, little is known about the nascent VAPA interaction paradigm: what are the fundamental metaphors and guidelines for design, how they might empower and constrain visually impaired users? The research described in this dissertation begins to answer these questions through a qualitative document review of VAPA design guidelines published by Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Alibaba. My findings reveal that these companies have many similar guidelines which indicate an underlying assumption that VAPAs should be modeled after the human-human conversation. I draw on prior work about the needs of people with visual impairments to critique this taken-for-granted human-human conversation metaphor and offer amendments to prevailing design guidelines that can make VAPAs fully achieve their potential to become universally usable.