The Ambivalent Experience of Eye Contact for People with Visual Impairments: Mechanisms and Design Challenges

TL;DR

This paper explores how eye contact functions in interactions involving people with visual impairments, identifying mechanisms and design challenges to improve accessibility beyond mere gaze visibility.

Contribution

It provides a mechanism-level analysis of eye contact experiences for visually impaired individuals and proposes design challenges for more inclusive interaction cues.

Findings

Gaze cannot always allocate the floor; explicit naming is needed.

Unclear speech cues and ongoing access work cause fatigue and withdrawal.

Eye-contact norms influence participation judgments, prompting visibility management.

Abstract

In mixed-ability collaboration, eye contact is often treated as a default cue for attention and turn-taking. As these signals are primarily visual, they are not reliably accessible to people with visual impairments. While prior work emphasized technical solutions, mechanism-level explanations of their experiences with sighted partners remain scarce. We interviewed 17 people with visual impairments about everyday interactions across work, education, and social settings. Using a critical-realist lens, we link events to plausible causal mechanisms and identify three recurring mechanisms: First, when gaze cannot allocate the floor, addressability hinges on explicit naming. Second, unclear speech entry cues and ongoing access work split attention and build fatigue, sometimes leading to withdrawal. Third, eye-contact norms can skew judgments of participation, prompting active management of visibility. We translate these mechanisms into five design challenges that reframe accessible eye contact as supporting configurable interaction contracts rather than merely making gaze visible.