From Tapping to Touching: Making Touch Screens Accessible to Blind Users

"I can do everything but see!" -- How People with Vision Impairments Negotiate their Abilities in Social Contexts

“…Examples include systems to support spatial awareness and navigation [12,13,21,22,26,62], to aid the identification of specific objects or their characteristics [5,14,15], to assist the detection and identification of text [17], barcodes [31], signs [18,51], or currency [32], and help with handwriting [43]. For digital user interfaces, we further find many applications for the input and recognition of Braille on touchscreens [3,27,34,52], and alternatives for text-entry or navigating digital menus [7,38,24,25,63]. These technologies have been oriented towards assisting practical, well-defined functional tasks that are often treated in isolation from the wider social contexts in which they occur.…”

Investigating Laboratory and Everyday Typing Performance of Blind Users

“…To address this problem a number of works have proposed novel interfaces for nonvisual text-entry on mobile touchscreen devices; including new keyboard layouts [Yfantidis and Evreinov 2006, Guerreiro et al 2008, Bonner et al 2010 and alternative methods of inputting text [Tinwala and MacKenzie 2010, Oliveira et al 2011, Mascetti et al 2012, Southern et al 2012, Azenkot et al 2012.…”

“…Dwelling on a character after a gesture was used to access alternative characters. NavTouch also used a gestural approach [Guerreiro et al 2008], allowing blind users to navigate through the alphabet using four directions. Horizontal gestures would navigate the alphabet sequentially, and vertical gestures would navigate between vowels, which served as shortcuts to reach the intended letter.…”

“…Previous laboratory studies have shown that blind users achieve lower typing rates than sighted users and make more errors [Oliveira et al 2011, Azenkot et al 2012. Most prior solutions that attempted to tackle these problems used familiar keyboard layouts [Guerreiro et al 2008, Bonner et al 2010 and Braille-based approaches [Azenkot et al 2011, Mascetti et al 2012, Southern et al 2012.…”

Typing Performance of Blind Users

“…While the visual layout of the QWERTY keyboard is identical to that presented to sighted users, the text-entry rates are much slower for visually impaired users [19]. To address this problem a number of works have proposed novel interfaces for non-visual text-entry on mobile touchscreen devices; including new keyboard layouts [3,8] and alternative methods of inputting text [1,16,19,22,23].…”