Informing Accessible Design of AI Literacy Apps through Practices of Blind Parents Reading with Sighted Children

Being involved in teaching children to read, especially to decode (i.e., to translate written words to oral speech) is important and crucial to development. There is an increasing number of AI tools and educational apps aimed at teaching sighted children to read. However, many commercial literacy apps are not accessible, few studies of such apps exist, and studies rarely include blind parents as participants. Thus, we conducted an exploratory interview study with four blind parents about their decoding practices with their sighted children, literacy app accessibility, and AI decoding apps. We found that blind parents are motivated to teach their children literacy skills such as decoding; leverage (largely inaccessible) technology and techniques to support decoding; and want to be able to teach alongside the AI literacy apps and to make the AI teach like they do. We conclude with a discussion of design implications for AI literacy apps.