Design Research.

(Community-Based Participatory Design)
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The p5 Access Project, is an attempt to level the playing field for blind computer users interested in learning how to code.
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After a series of expert interviews with blind coders, I developed tactile learning tools and an accessible curriculum for interested participants that are blind or have low-vision.
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With colleagues and volunteers, I organized a series of 6 coding workshops, and focus groups for people that are blind, or have low-vision.

At each meeting, we spent 2 hours going over coding concepts and exercises, and 1-2 hours user-testing accessible web-based p5.js learning prototypes. The feedback received, contributed to multiple iterations of this work.

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This research contributed to my work towards an accessibility-related redesign of the p5.js site and reference resource. This work is available at p5js.org
This research also contributed to my development of a high-contrast p5 editor theme and a system of communicating the visualizations written in p5 as screenreader-accessible text descriptions and tones.
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The LES Women's Heart Health Project, was a community-based design research project aimed at better designing community-specific information about women's cardiovascular health.

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In September 2014, I set out to address poor civic participation/female representation in the creation of digital health education and promotion materials around women’s cardiovascular health. The end product was a resource website prototype for women's heart health that included neighbourhood resource maps and user-generated content.
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Over the next few months, I met with a number of CVD health practitioners and researchers to learn about their process in prevention. I also recruited 8 women living on the Lower Eastside. Over two sessions, I asked them demographic questions, health questions, about heart attack symptoms and finally opened up to a discussion about media usage, health beliefs, influences on health beliefs and effective/ineffective health messaging.
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I asked what they would create and what they would like to see and once a prototype was created, user-testing commenced. A total of two iterations were produced from this process and the site prototype can be viewed here.