Flat is the New Pitch-Black : Discussing Blind use of Touchscreens

The increasingly ubiquitous touchscreen, from the smart phone to the treadmill, is a significant hurdle for blind individuals who cannot rely on their sense of touch for decoding its interface. Advances in smart phone screen readers, such as the iPhone’s Voice Over, have enabled blind users to effectively navigate touchscreens. While Voice Over efficiently outputs information, text input remained a challenge. To address this, we previously introduced BrailleTouch, a soft braille keyboard for efficient blind text entry on touchscreens. In this position paper, we present the tailored touch-based user experience design and evaluation techniques we developed for BrailleTouch which we have not previously discussed. QC 20160407