Blind-friendly user interfaces - a pilot study on improving the accessibility of touchscreen interfaces

Touchscreen devices such as a smartphone, smartwatch, and tablets are essential assistive devices for visually impaired and blind people in performing activities of daily living. The vision alternative accessibility services such as screen readers, multimodal interactions, vibro-tactical, haptic feedback, and gestures are helping blind people in operating touchscreen interfaces. Part of usability problem with today touchscreen user interfaces contributes to a trade-off in discoverability, navigational complexity, cognitive overload, layout persistency, a cumbersome input mechanism, accessibility, and cross-device interactions. One solution to these problems is to design an accessibility-inclusive blind-friendly user interface framework for performing common activities on a smartphone. This framework re-organizes/re-generates the interface components into a simplified blind-friendly user interface based on user profile and contextual recommendations. The paper reports an improvement in the user experience of blind people in performing activities on a smartphone. Forty-one blind people have participated in this empirical study, resulting in improved users and interaction experience in an operating smartphone.