André Rodrigues
Kyle Montague
Hugo Nicolau
Tiago Guerreiro
ABSTRACT
The advent of system-wide accessibility services on mainstream touch-based smartphones has been a major point of inclusion for blind and visually impaired people. Ever since, researchers aimed to improve the accessibility of specific tasks, such text-entry and gestural interaction. However, little work aimed to understand and improve the overall accessibility of these devices in real world settings. In this paper, we present an eight-week long study with five novice blind participants where we seek to understand major concerns, expectations, challenges, barriers, and experiences with smartphones. The study included pre-adoption and weekly interviews, weekly controlled task assessments, and in-the wild system-wide usage. Our results show that mastering these devices is an arduous and long task, confirming the users' initial concerns. We report on accessibility barriers experienced throughout the study, which could not be encountered in task-based laboratorial settings. Finally, we discuss how smartphones are being integrated in everyday activities and highlight the need for better adoption support tools.
- Anthony, L., Kim, Y., & Findlater, L. (2013). Analyzing user-generated youtube videos to understand touchscreen use by people with motor impairments. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1223--1232). ACM. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Azenkot, S., Rector, K., Ladner, R., and Wobbrock, J. Passchords: secure multi-touch authentication for blind people. In Proceedings of the 14th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility, ASSETS '12, ACM (2012), 159--166 Google ScholarDigital Library
- Azenkot, S., Wobbrock, J. O., Prasain, S., & Ladner, R. E. (2012, May). Input finger detection for nonvisual touch screen text entry in Perkinput. In Proceedings of Graphics Interface 2012 (pp. 121--129). Canadian Information Processing Society. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Bonner, M., Brudvik, J., Abowd, G. and Edwards, W. K. No-Look Notes: Accessible eyes-free multi-touch text entry. Proc. Pervasive '10, Springer (2010), 409--427. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Buzzi, M. C., Buzzi, M., Leporini, B., & Paratore, M. T. (2013). Vibro-Tactile Enrichment Improves Blind User Interaction with Mobile Touchscreens. In Human-Computer Interaction--INTERACT 2013 (pp. 641--648). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Buzzi, M. C., Buzzi, M., Leporini, B., & Trujillo, A. (2014). Designing a text entry multimodal keypad for blind users of touchscreen mobile phones. In Proceedings of the 16th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers & accessibility (pp. 131--136). ACM. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Guerreiro, T., H. Nicolau, J. Jorge & D. Gonçalves, (2009). NavTap: A Long Term Study with Excluded Blind Users. In Proceedings of the 11th international ACM conference on computers and accessibility (ASSETS'09), 99--106. NewYork: ACM Press. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Kane, S. K., Bigham, J. P., & Wobbrock, J. O. (2008). Slide rule: making mobile touch screens accessible to blind people using multi-touch interaction techniques. In Proceedings of the 10th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility (pp. 73--80). ACM. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Kane, S. K., Jayant, C., Wobbrock, J. O., & Ladner, R. E. (2009). Freedom to roam: a study of mobile device adoption and accessibility for people with visual and motor disabilities. In Proceedings of the 11th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility (pp. 115--122). ACM. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Montague, K., Nicolau, H., & Hanson, V. L. (2014). Motor-impaired touchscreen interactions in the wild. In Proceedings of the 16th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers & accessibility (pp. 123--130). ACM. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Naftali, M., & Findlater, L. (2014). Accessibility in context: understanding the truly mobile experience of smartphone users with motor impairments. In Proceedings of the 16th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers & accessibility (pp. 209--216). ACM. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Oh, U., Kane, S. K., & Findlater, L. (2013). Follow that sound: using sonification and corrective verbal feedback to teach touchscreen gestures. In Proceedings of the 15th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (p. 13). ACM Google ScholarDigital Library
- Oliveira, J., Guerreiro, T., Nicolau, H., Jorge, J., & Gonçalves, D. (2011). Blind people and mobile touch-based text-entry: acknowledging the need for different flavors. In The proceedings of the 13th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility (pp. 179--186). ACM. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Romero, M., Frey, B., Southern, C., & Abowd, G. D. (2011). BrailleTouch: designing a mobile eyes-free soft keyboard. In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Human Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (pp. 707--709). ACM Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- Getting Smartphones to Talkback: Understanding the Smartphone Adoption Process of Blind Users
Recommendations
Smartphone Usage by Expert Blind Users
CHI '21: Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsPeople with vision impairments access smartphones with the help of screen reader apps such as TalkBack for Android and VoiceOver for iPhone. Prior research has mostly focused on understanding touchscreen phone adoption and typing performance of novice ...
BlindNavi: A Navigation App for the Visually Impaired Smartphone User
CHI EA '15: Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing SystemsThese days, many of us frequently use mobile apps to help us navigate. However, these apps with touch screens are not user-friendly for visually impaired people who are eager to be able to leave their homes independently. Moreover, the most widely used ...
Investigating touchscreen accessibility for people with visual impairments
NordiCHI '08: Proceedings of the 5th Nordic conference on Human-computer interaction: building bridgesTouchscreen computing devices such as the iPhone are becoming more common. However this technology is largely inaccessible to people with visual impairments. We present the results of a requirements capture study that illustrates the problems with ...
Comments