Virtual meetings often exclude individuals who rely on text-based communication, such as autistic adults and those with social anxiety. This paper introduces a prototype that converts typed text into emotive avatars using LLM technology, which convey emotional tone through modulated vocal and facial expressions. We reflect on design choices for using LLMs in accessible meetings and discuss insights from our semi-structured interviews with 18 autistic adults and adults with social anxiety. Our qualitative analysis revealed the following key insights: 1) Participants found the avatars helpful in alleviating challenges like masking and exhaustion, with some noting that the avatars enhanced their communication, increasing participation and confidence; 2) While they valued the avatars' affective capabilities, including both vocal and facial animations, they were sensitive to inaccuracies in vocal expression; and 3) Participants desired more personalized control over the avatars' affect to balance societal expectations with authentic expression.

We introduce the In Real Life (IRL) Ditto, an AI-driven embodied agent designed to represent remote colleagues in shared office spaces, creating opportunities for real-time exchanges even in their absence. IRL Ditto offers a unique hybrid experience by allowing in-person colleagues to encounter a digital version of their remote teammates, initiating greetings, updates, or small talk as they might in person. Our research question examines: How can the IRL Ditto influence interactions and relationships among colleagues in a shared office space? Through a four-day study, we assessed IRL Ditto's ability to strengthen social ties by simulating presence and enabling meaningful interactions across different levels of social familiarity. We find that enhancing social relationships depended deeply on the foundation of the relationship participants had with the source of the IRL Ditto. This study provides insights into the role of embodied agents in enriching workplace dynamics for distributed teams.

Technology-mediated communication tools are widely used to maintain connections between older adults and their remote family members. However, challenges often arise due to differences in their life rhythms and communication preferences, such as time zones, daily routines, or preferred platforms. To address these challenges, we propose using Ditto, a mimetic embodied agent, in video-call-like interactions between an older adult and a remote family member. When direct interaction is difficult, FamilyDitto can represent either party, providing a strong social presence and a personalized experience to the other person. To explore the potential of Ditto in supporting intergenerational communication, we conducted seven co-design workshops (n=27) with older adults and younger family members. Our thematic analysis reveals Ditto's potential roles as both a temporal bridge and an emotional proxy, identifies the tension between faithful and idealized representations, and emphasizes the importance of personalization to support unique family dynamics. We distill our findings into implications for designing mediated semi-synchronous communication, using idealized representation responsibly, and addressing the asymmetric motivations and comfort levels with Ditto across roles and ages. This study provides a foundation for mimetic AI technologies that enhance, rather than replace, human connection in remote intergenerational relationships.

Since the Covid-19 pandemic, video calling (VC) has become a staple means of daily communication. Beyond socializing, VC in the United States (U.S.) now supports remote work, healthcare and education. The sudden ubiquity of VC could have presented both advantages and challenges for chronically ill people. However, our understanding of chronically ill people’s experiences with VC remains limited. To address this gap, we conducted the largest online survey study (N=55) on chronically ill people’s VC experiences in the U.S.—investigating their routines, facilitators and barriers. Our quantitative and qualitative findings established that chronically ill people heavily depend on VC to cope with everyday life. At the same time, VC can also detrimentally exacerbate cognitive (e.g., brain fog), emotional (e.g., self-consciousness) and physical challenges (e.g., migraines) for chronically ill people. In response, we offer actionable design opportunities to improve the accessibility and experience of VC for chronically ill people.

Hybridge is an experimental system for exploring the design of remote inclusion for hybrid meetings. In-room users see remote participants on individual displays positioned around a table, and remotes see video feeds from the room integrated into a digital twin of the meeting room. Remotes can choose where to appear in and view the meeting room from. We designed two digital interfaces for remote attendees, one using a 2D canvas, and the other using a 3D digital twin of the room as the medium of interaction. To decide which interface to use for future evaluation, we conducted a within-subjects comparison of 24 groups completing survival tasks. We found that 3D outperformed 2D in the participants’ perceived sense of awareness, sense of agency, and physical presence. The majority of participants also subjectively preferred 3D over 2D. We discuss design recommendations based on usage patterns and participant comments, and plans for further research.

Hybrid meetings limit inclusion for remote participants. The Hybridge experimental system provides different interfaces for remote and room endpoints, focusing on improving inclusion via shared spatiality and remote agency. In-room participants see remotes on displays around a table, and remotes see video integrated into a digital twin. Remotes can choose where to appear and from where they view the room. We tested Hybridge in a within-subjects study of group survival tasks. An in-person condition was followed by a counterbalanced order of hybrid traditional videoconferencing ("Gallery") and Hybridge. We found that co-presence and agency differences between in-room and remotes were alleviated in Hybridge but remained in Gallery. Physical presence for remotes was higher in Hybridge than Gallery. Conversation flow was better in Hybridge than Gallery, but ease of awareness was not different. We argue that asymmetry should be embraced when designing hybrid meeting systems, with inclusivity achieved by tailoring features for the needs of different endpoints.

Imagine being able to send a personalized embodied agent to meetings you are unable to attend. This paper explores the idea of a Ditto—an agent that visually resembles a person, sounds like them, possesses knowledge about them, and can represent them in meetings. This paper reports on results from two empirical investigations: 1) focus group sessions with six groups (n=24) and 2) a Wizard of Oz (WOz) study with 10 groups (n=39) recruited from within a large technology company. Results from the focus group sessions provide insights on what contexts are appropriate for Dittos, and issues around social acceptability and representation risk. The focus group results also provide feedback on visual design characteristics for Dittos. In the WOz study, teams participated in meetings with two different embodied agents: a Ditto and a Delegate (an agent which did not resemble the absent person). Insights from this research demonstrate the impact these embodied agents can have in meetings and highlight that Dittos in particular show promise in evoking feelings of presence and trust, as well as informing decision making. These results also highlight issues related to relationship dynamics such as maintaining social etiquette, managing one's professional reputation, and upholding accountability. Overall, our investigation provides early evidence that Dittos could be beneficial to represent users when they are unable to be present but also outlines many factors that need to be carefully considered to successfully realize this vision.

Workplaces around the globe are beginning to rapidly adopt hybrid meetings to conduct, plan, and organize their work. While previous literature explores the benefits and drawbacks of hybrid meetings, the experiences of professionals with disabilities are largely missing. With an orientation towards an accessible future of work, we interviewed 21 professionals with disabilities to unpack the accessibility barriers, opportunities, and conflicts of hybrid meetings. We highlight the creative ways professionals with disabilities developed workarounds and repairs to these accessibility tensions. Our paper expands the understanding of accessibility in hybrid meetings by identifying how the visibility of access labor may be affected by being in the room together with other colleagues or joining remotely. We also observed how hybrid configurations can require navigating accessibility conflicts specific to the location site of each participant. Building from our analysis, we offer practical suggestions and design directions to make hybrid meetings accessible.

Profile pictures can convey rich social signals that are often inaccessible to blind and low vision screen reader users. Although there have been efforts to understand screen reader users’ preferences for alternative (alt) text descriptions when encountering images online, profile pictures evoke distinct information needs. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 16 screen reader users to understand their preferences for various styles of profile picture image descriptions in different social contexts. We also interviewed seven sighted individuals to explore their thoughts on authoring alt text for profile pictures. Our findings suggest that detailed image descriptions and user narrated alt text can provide screen reader users enjoyable and informative experiences when exploring profile pictures. We also identified mismatches between how sighted individuals would author alt text with what screen reader users prefer to know about profile pictures. We discuss the implications of our findings for social applications that support profile pictures.

Relative to in-person meetings, conversations in video meetings have long been reported as stilted. Spatial audio in video meetings can simulate the way we hear the world by separating audio streams based on speakers’ virtual locations. We report on a within-subject experiment in which 75 employees of a global technology company completed two group survival tasks with spatial audio enabled or disabled. Spatial audio increased perceptions of interactivity, shared space, and ease of understanding. Women experienced effects for social presence while men experienced effects for turn-taking. We discuss implications for inclusion, task performance, fatigue, and future research.

Presenters often screen-share slides over remote meetings as visual aids. Screen reader users however often do not have adequate ways to access slide content during presentations. To inform the design of more accessible interfaces, we ran a formative design workshop to elicit what screen reader users value during live screen-shared presentations, which are Prioritize Key Information, Reduce Cognitive Load, Provide Exploration Independence, Minimize Control Effort, and Encode Spatial Information. Based on these values, we created two prototypes that users experienced in a follow-up design probe. These interactions provide users control over what, when, and how slide elements are read out and introduce spatial audio separation between the presenter's voice and screen reader audio. Participants found that a laptop-based prototype designed for the first four values significantly improved the accessibility of screen-shared content over existing tools, even with a presenter who was perceived to present materials accessibly. The importance of concurrent exploration is highlighted by participants' frequent and diverse use of access to consume information complementary to the presenter, align focus, and understand information using alternative means. A phone-based prototype that encoded spatial information and greater exploration independence at the cost of increased cognitive load received mixed feedback, illustrating the balance between values that interaction design needs to strike. We conclude with insights and considerations for how the identified values and corresponding interactions can be used to improve the accessibility of screen-shared presentations.

With the shift to hybrid meetings in work spaces, there is an increasing need to create a more inclusive hybrid meeting experience where people meeting together in a room interact with those joining remotely. This paper describes a design exploration, implementation, and evaluation of Perspectives, a novel hybrid meeting system that aimed to create an inclusive and equitable space for hybrid meetings. Perspectives digitally composites everyone into a virtual room so that each person has a unique but spatially consistent viewpoint into the meeting. The user study compared Perspectives with three commercially available UX designs for hybrid meetings: Gallery, Together Mode, and Front Row. Results from this study revealed key benefits of Perspectives, including supporting natural interactions, creating a strong sense of co-presence, and reducing cognitive load. Results from the study also helped iterate on the design principles of Perspectives, which offer important insights on supporting hybrid meetings.

Hybrid video calls include attendees in a conference room with loudspeakers and remote attendees using headsets, each with different options for rendering sound spatially. Two studies explored the listener experience with spatial audio in video calls. One study examined the in-room experience using loudspeakers, comparing among spatialization algorithms spreading voices out horizontally. A second study compared varying degrees of horizontal separation of binaurally rendered voices for a remote participant using a headset. In-room participants preferred the widest spatialization over monophonic, stereo, and stereo-binary audio in metrics related to intelligibility and helpfulness. Remote participants preferred different widths of the audio stage depending on the number of voices. In both studies, rendering sound spatially increased performance in speech stream identification. Results indicate spatial audio benefits for in-room and remote attendees in video calls, although the in-room attendees accepted a wider audio stage than remote users.

Unlike meetings in person, it is a well known but still unsolved problem that in traditional videoconferencing people just appear and disappear [56]. The lack of Conversational Transitions (CTs) is unnatural and also limits the both ritualistic and spontaneous small talk of collegiality and productivity that happen in transitional moments. We report a design investigation of the pros and cons of a CT-Space UI that that intertwines spatial and temporal metaphors to support a range of conversational transitions before, during, and after meetings, but, crucially, might also fit into standard periodic workplace practices rather than require all-day connection. We explore the comprehensibility of visual transitions in space, how spatial audio supports transitions, blending spatial and temporal metaphors, and fluid and visible group clustering. We argue that CTs should be a standard requirement for videoconferencing services.

Working from home has become a mainstream work practice in many organizations during the COVID-19 pandemic. While remote work has received much scholarly and public attention over the years, we still know little about how people with disabilities engage in remote work from their homes and what access means in this context. To understand and rethink accessibility in remote work, the present paper studies work-from-home practices of neurodivergent professionals who have Autism Spectrum Disorder, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, learning disabilities (e.g., dyslexia) and psychosocial disabilities (e.g., anxiety, depression). We report on interviews with 36 US-based neurodivergent professionals who have been working from home during the pandemic. Our findings reveal that while working from home, neurodivergent professionals create accessible physical and digital workspaces, negotiate accessible communication practices, and reconcile tensions between productivity and wellbeing. Our analysis reconsiders what access means in remote work for neurodivergent professionals and offers practical insights for inclusive work practices and accessibility improvements in remote collaboration tools.

To understand the lived experience of how people with disabilities telework in the United States, 25 people were interviewed. The participants included people who are blind or low vision, deaf or hard of hearing, neurodiverse, have limited mobility/dexterity, and have chronic health issues. The interviews focused on how they used video calling, screen sharing, and collaborative editing technologies to accomplish their telework. The interviews found ways in which design choices made in telework technologies interact with people's abilities, especially those who are blind or low vision, since the tools rely heavily on the visual channel to enable remote collaboration. A central theme emerged around how design choices made in telework technologies affect the digital representation of people's online activities in the video call interface: those who turn off their video (because they are blind or do not want to expend the cognitive effort to present themselves over video) are relegated to a static icon on a blank video frame with their name while those who are deaf and speak silently through a sign language interpreter never show up in interfaces that use active speaker detection to choose which video streams to display. Users with disabilities may avoid using screen sharing and collaborative editing tools which "leak" cues that disclose their disabilities. Because the interviews were conducted during the first month of the COVID-19 pandemic response, they also provided a preview of how the sudden shift to pervasive teleworking affected their telework experience.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced many people to abruptly shift to remote work in early 2020. But as countries progressed through a recovery from the pandemic, as occurred in China beginning in the spring of 2020, companies went through a process of reopening their offices. People worked in a hybrid mode in which they could decide how to divide their time working from home and in the office. In this research, we explored what are the key factors that shaped employees’ decisions. We conducted a survey and interviews with employees in China of a global technology company. The data demonstrated people’s work time arrangements between home and office, their experiences when working from home, and their preferred work mode. Through the interviews, we identified people’s diverse strategies and reasons behind the decisions of where to work during the hybrid work phase.

During the past year we've all spent many hours on videoconference calls, sometimes more than was comfortable. While CHI might not have anticipated a viral-driven surge in videoconferencing, online meetings has been a topic of CHI research for the past 25 years. This is a good time to assess how well our research has matched what this natural experiment is telling us. What did we get right? And what did the field get wrong? The panel, comprised of people who directly witnessed much of this history, will reflect on these questions. We don't expect all to agree with each panelist's conclusions, and we will invite reactions and contributions from the audience as well..