Non-Visual Cooking: Exploring Practices and Challenges of Meal Preparation by People with Visual Impairments
Franklin Mingzhe Li, Anhong Guo, Stacy M. Branham · 2021 · The 23rd International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2021) · doi:10.1145/3441852.3471215
Summary
This paper investigates how people with visual impairments prepare meals, combining two complementary research methods to build a comprehensive picture of non-visual cooking practices and challenges. The first method is a content analysis of 122 YouTube videos featuring visually impaired people cooking, which documented techniques across 12 distinct cooking activities including cutting and chopping, measuring ingredients, pouring liquids, spreading, placing pans on burners, baking, turning food, testing doneness, using tools and appliances, navigating kitchen spaces, distinguishing between items, and following general safety practices. The video analysis revealed a rich repertoire of adaptive strategies: using hands to weigh and measure ingredients, employing sound and smell to judge when food is done, placing fingers near knife blades for guided cutting, and using tactile markers on appliance dials. The second method involved semi-structured interviews with 12 visually impaired participants (five totally blind, seven legally blind) ranging in age from 19 to 55, with cooking experience from 1 to 40 years. The interviews went beyond what YouTube videos could capture, uncovering the cognitive and emotional dimensions of cooking without sight. Participants described the mental load of tracking multiple tasks simultaneously, the anxiety around burn risks, and the frustration of following recipes that assume visual ability. The combination of public video data with private interview data gives the study an unusually well-rounded perspective on non-visual cooking, capturing both the practiced techniques people choose to share publicly and the struggles they experience privately.
Key findings
The research identified eight major themes of cooking challenges for people with visual impairments: utilizing tools (difficulty with appliance interfaces and adapting equipment), information access (inaccessible recipes and cooking instructions), touching and feeling (heavy reliance on touch for tasks like checking doneness, complicated by dirty or wet hands), safety and consequences (burn risks, cuts, and food safety concerns), precision and ambiguity (difficulty with exact measurements and following precise steps), organizing and tracking (mental burden of tracking multiple in-progress tasks and locating items), item and quality inspection (determining food freshness, checking if items are properly cleaned or peeled), and collaborative cooking and communication (tension between needing help and maintaining independence). A key finding is the fundamental conflict between touch-based adaptive strategies and the use of electronic assistive devices—participants noted that dirty hands during cooking make it impractical to interact with smartphones, braille displays, or other touch-based technology. Eight of twelve participants used remote assistance apps like Aira or Be My Eyes while cooking but reported challenges with camera positioning and field of view limitations. The study also found that participants resist adopting new cooking techniques even when safer alternatives exist, preferring familiar methods they have already mastered.
Relevance
This research has direct implications for the design of assistive cooking technologies and accessible kitchen environments. The finding that touch-based device interaction conflicts with hands-dirty cooking tasks makes a strong case for zero-touch interfaces—voice control, ambient sensors, and computer vision systems that can monitor cooking status without requiring physical interaction. For accessibility practitioners, the study highlights that activities of daily living like cooking involve complex, multi-sensory challenges that go well beyond what screen readers or standard assistive technology can address. The eight challenge themes provide a useful framework for evaluating and designing kitchen-related assistive technologies. The research also underscores the importance of accessible recipe formats and cooking instruction design, an area where web accessibility standards could be extended. The methodology of combining YouTube video analysis with interviews offers a model for studying assistive technology use in domestic settings where direct observation may be impractical.
Tags: visual impairments · cooking · meal preparation · independent living · assistive technology · activities of daily living · zero-touch interaction · safety · YouTube analysis