A surge in public availability of emerging GenAI-AD has brought back the promises of automated accessibility for people who cannot see or see well. This article tests those promises through a double-rendering method that asks GenAI-AD engines to describe a simple portrait of a person and then returns these generated texts into GenAI-AD engines for visualizations of what they earlier had described, revealing insights about GenAI efficacies, ethics, and biases.

This experience report shares lessons learned from a multi-staged prototyping process, over a five-year period, that involved the creation and iterative development of a mobile platform and dozens of prototype examples of interactive locative-media artifacts, including locative journalism. Thematically linked to a public art collection, the mobile app was designed as a research instrument aimed at an external audience of passersby, actively using smartphones. This paper documents and outlines key decisions made about the platform and content in response to observed experiences. It also identifies emergent areas of research potential intertwined in the undertaking of such a prototyping process.

Background: This paper offers a hybrid, place-based ethic drawn from multiple perspectives as a way to reinvigorate ethical thought for technical communicators. Literature review: Aldo Leopold's land ethic asks us to consider actions beyond our immediate surroundings. Martin Buber's dialogic ethics complement a land ethic and interrogate interpersonal communication. Anticipatory technology ethics recommends the integration of ethical discussions and decisions during the design phase of new technologies. Together, these three approaches inform a place-based ethic for technical communicators. Research questions: 1. How might we meaningfully merge the many ways that technical communicators from varying backgrounds approach ethics into a useful ethical model that considers human interaction, technological innovation, and physical place? 2. How might such a merged model, what we call a place-based ethic, affect technical communication design? Methods: We analyze cases including documents from radical environmental defense groups, a restyling of certain federal court rules from legalese into plainer language, the creation of mortgage documents suitable for consumers and industry professionals, and the action-research design phase of a locative mobile application about public art. Results and conclusion: The cases provide concrete examples of the components of a place-based ethic, and we conclude that designing with a place-based ethic includes actively acknowledging the value of the environment, seeking areas for dialogue among involved parties and celebrating dialogue where it occurs, seeking shared spaces, clearly stating anticipated outcomes, and usability testing for potential ethical issues.

To build upon user-centered design methods, we used a collaborative and multi-modal approach to involve users early in the design process for a website. This article presents our methods and results and addresses the benefits and limitations of the Collaborative Prototype Design Process (CPDP), including ways in which this new method can be implemented. The CPDP is an innovative approach to user-centered website design that emphasizes collaboration, iterative testing, and data-driven design. The CPDP balances the power and needs of users with those of designers and, thus, enables design teams to test more tasks and involve more users. We divided our initial team into three independent design teams to separately profile users, test usability of low-fidelity paper prototypes, and then create and test usability of resulting wireframes. After completing the user-centered design and usability testing, the three teams merged to analyze their diverse findings and create a final prototype.