We report the results of a study on the learnability of haptic icons used as alerts or notifications in smartphones. The aim was to explore the feasibility of using haptic icons to create assistive technologies for people with visual impairments. We compared the performance and satisfaction of users with different visual capacities (visually impaired vs. sighted) and using different learning processes (with or without a reinforcement learning stage). The reinforcement learning stage improves the recognition rate in both types of users, although the improvement obtained by the visually impaired users is even better as their recognition rates become very similar to those obtained by the sighted users. Finally, it was observed that the better recognized haptic icons are those assigned to the most employed applications by the user.
We report the results of a study on the learnability ofhaptic icons used in a system for incoming-call identification in mobile phones. The aim was to explore the feasibility of using haptic icons to create new assistive technologies for people with visual impairments. We compared the performance and satisfaction of users with different visual capacities (visually impaired vs. sighted) and using different learning processes (unimodal vs. multimodal). A better recognition rate and user experience were observed for the visually impaired than for sighted users and for multimodal rather than unimodal learning processes.
We report the results of a study on the learnability of the locations of haptic icons on smartphones. The aim was to study the influence of the use of complex and different vibration patterns associated with haptic icons compared to the use of simple and equal vibrations on commercial location-assistance applications. We studied the performance of users with different visual capacities (visually impaired vs. sighted) in terms of the time taken to learn the icons’ locations and the icon recognition rate. We also took into consideration the users’ satisfaction with the application developed to perform the study. The experiments concluded that the use of complex and different instead of simple and equal vibration patterns obtains better recognition rates. This improvement is even more noticeable for visually impaired users, who obtain results comparable to those achieved by sighted users.
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