With the increasing popularity of mainstream wearable devices, it is critical to assess the accessibility implications of such technologies. For people with visual impairments, who do not always need the visual display of a mobile phone, alternative means of eyes-free wearable interaction are particularly appealing. To explore the potential impacts of such technology, we conducted two studies. The first was an online survey that included 114 participants with visual impairments and 101 sighted participants; we compare the two groups in terms of current device use. The second was an interview and design probe study with 10 participants with visual impairments. Our findings expand on past work to characterize a range of trends in smartphone use and accessibility issues therein. Participants with visual impairments also responded positively to two eyes-free wearable device scenarios: a wristband or ring and a glasses-based device. Discussions on projected use of these devices suggest that small, easily accessible, and discreet wearable input could positively impact the ability of people with visual impairments to access information on the go and to participate in certain social interactions.

The vast majority of work on understanding and supporting the gesture creation process has focused on professional designers. In contrast, gesture customization by end userswhich may offer better memorability, efficiency and accessibility than pre-defined gestures-has received little attention. To understand the end-user gesture creation process, we conducted a study where 20 participants were asked to: (1) exhaustively create new gestures for an openended use case; (2) exhaustively create new gestures for 12 specific use cases; (3) judge the saliency of different touchscreen gesture features. Our findings showed that even when asked to create novel gestures, participants tended to focus on the familiar. Misconceptions about the gesture recognizer's abilities were also evident, and in some cases constrained the range of gestures that participants created. Finally, as a calibration point for future research, we used a simple gesture recognizer ($N) to analyze recognition accuracy of the participants' custom gesture sets: accuracy was 68-88% on average, depending on the amount of training and the customization scenario. We conclude with implications for the design of a mixed-initiative approach to support custom gesture creation.

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NavCog3 is a smartphone turn-by-turn navigation assistant system we developed specifically designed to enable independent navigation for people with visual impairments. Using off-the-shelf Bluetooth beacons installed in the surrounding environment and a commodity smartphone carried by the user, NavCog3 achieves unparalleled localization accuracy in real-world large-scale scenarios. By leveraging its accurate localization capabilities, NavCog3 guides the user through the environment and signals the presence of semantic features and points of interest in the vicinity (e.g., doorways, shops). To assess the capability of NavCog3 to promote independent mobility of individuals with visual impairments, we deployed and evaluated the system in two challenging real-world scenarios. The first scenario demonstrated the scalability of the system, which was permanently installed in a five-story shopping mall spanning three buildings and a public underground area. During the study, 10 participants traversed three fixed routes, and 43 participants traversed free-choice routes across the environment. The second scenario validated the system’s usability in the wild in a hotel complex temporarily equipped with NavCog3 during a conference for individuals with visual impairments. In the hotel, almost 14.2h of system usage data were collected from 37 unique users who performed 280 travels across the environment, for a total of 30,200m traversed.

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