Mobile assistive technologies for the visually impaired

There are around 285 million visually impaired people worldwide, and around 370,000 people are registered as blind or partially sighted in the UK. Ongoing advances in information technology (IT) are increasing the scope for IT-based mobile assistive technologies to facilitate the independence, safety, and improved quality of life of the visually impaired. Research is being directed at making mobile phones and other handheld devices accessible via our haptic (touch) and audio sensory channels. We review research and innovation within the field of mobile assistive technology for the visually impaired and, in so doing, highlight the need for successful collaboration between clinical expertise, computer science, and domain users to realize fully the potential benefits of such technologies. We initially reflect on research that has been conducted to make mobile phones more accessible to people with vision loss. We then discuss innovative assistive applications designed for the visually impaired that are either delivered via mainstream devices and can be used while in motion (e.g., mobile phones) or are embedded within an environment that may be in motion (e.g., public transport) or within which the user may be in motion (e.g., smart homes)

Recommendations on a Test Infrastructure for Evaluation of Touchscreen Assistive Technology for Visually Impaired Users

Published version of a paper from the 13th Scandinavian Conference on Health Informatics, TromsøMobile technologies’ touchscreen allows the use of choreography of gestures to interact with the user interface. Relevant aspects in mobile technology design become crucial when targeting users with disabilities. For instance, when assistive technology is designed to support speech interaction between visually impaired users and a system, accessibility and ease-of-use of such technology should be included in the usability and technical evaluation of their effectiveness. This paper presents the analysis of the technical and physical infrastructure of a controlled laboratory environment for user evaluations made in the research project “Visually impaired users touching the screen - A user evaluation of assistive technology” where VoiceOver, a screen reader in Apple Inc. products was tested. The paper reports on challenges related to the use of the test infrastructure, such as how to obtain valuable data when interactive high-speed gestures are performed and how to optimise the recording and syn-chronisation between audio and video data. The lessons learned by the research group showed that there are effective alternatives for each challenge, and these should be customised for each particular test, type of participants and device

User Evaluation of the Smartphone Screen Reader VoiceOver with Visually Disabled Participants

Touchscreen assistive technology is designed to support speech interaction between visually disabled people and mobile devices, allowing hand gestures to interact with a touch user interface. In a global perspective, the World Health Organisation estimates that around 285 million people are visually disabled with 2/3 of them over 50 years old. This paper presents the user evaluation of VoiceOver, a built-in screen reader in Apple Inc. products, with a detailed analysis of the gesture interaction, familiarity and training by visually disabled users and the system response. Six participants with prescribed visual disability took part in the tests in a usability laboratory under controlled conditions. Data were collected and analysed using a mixed methods approach, with quantitative and qualitative measures. The results showed that the participants found most of the hand gestures easy to perform, although they reported inconsistent responses and lack of information associated to several functionalities. User training on each gesture was reported as key to allow participants to perform certain difficult or unknown gestures. The paper also reports on how to perform mobile device user evaluations in a laboratory environment and provides recommendations on technical and physical infrastructure.User Evaluation of the Smartphone Screen Reader VoiceOver with Visually Disabled ParticipantspublishedVersio

Tactile Media: Factors Affecting the Adoption of Touchscreen Smartphones Among Consumers with Vision Loss

Touchscreen technology is on the rise as the new standard in smartphone design. But, the usability of touchscreen is hindered for consumers that lack the physical ability to navigate such devices. Two focus groups were conducted in order to identify specific uses and gratifications that people with visual impairments had when using mobile phones. Additional questions were presented to the participants to determine if touchscreen technology limited access to communication and entertainment. The responses revealed an upward trend in touchscreen smartphone adoption among the participants. These users chose to adopt touchscreen smartphones that had built-in and downloadable assistive features which contributed to user-friendly designs

Challenges Faced by Persons with Disabilities Using Self-Service Technologies

Foreseeable game changing solutions to SSTs will allow for better universal access by better implementing features that are easy and intuitive to use from the inception. Additional robotic advancements will allow for better and easier delivery of goods for consumers. Improvements to artificial intelligence will allow for better communication through natural language and alternative forms of communication. Furthermore, artificial intelligence will aid consumers at SSTs by remembering the consumers preferences and needs. With all foreseeable game changing solutions people with disabilities will be consulted when new and improved SSTs are being developed allowing for the SST to maximize its potential

Accessibility of Mobile Devices for Visually Impaired Users: An Evaluation of the Screen-reader VoiceOver

A mobile device's touchscreen allows users to use a choreography of hand gestures to interact with the user interface. A screen reader on a mobile device is designed to support the interaction of visually disabled users while using gestures. This paper presents an evaluation of VoiceOver, a screen reader in Apple Inc. products. The evaluation was a part of the research project "Visually impaired users touching the screen - a user evaluation of assistive technology".publishedVersionnivå

Studies on the impact of assistive communication devices on the quality of life of patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis

Tese de doutoramento, Ciências Biomédicas (Neurociências), Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Medicina, 2016Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) is a progressive neuromuscular disease with rapid and generalized degeneration of motor neurons. Patients with ALS experiment a relentless decline in functions that affect performance of most activities of daily living (ADL), such as speaking, eating, walking or writing. For this reason, dependence on caregivers grows as the disease progresses. Management of the respiratory system is one of the main concerns of medical support, since respiratory failure is the most common cause of death in ALS. Due to increasing muscle weakness, most patients experience dramatic decrease of speech intelligibility and difficulties in using upper limbs (UL) for writing. There is growing evidence that mild cognitive impairment is common in ALS, but most patients are self-conscious of their difficulties in communicating and, in very severe stages, locked-in syndrome can occur. When no other resources than speech and writing are used to assist communication, patients are deprived of expressing needs or feelings, making decisions and keeping social relationships. Further, caregivers feel increased dependence due to difficulties in communication with others and get frustrated about difficulties in understanding partners’ needs. Support for communication is then very important to improve quality of life of both patients and caregivers; however, this has been poorly investigated in ALS. Assistive communication devices (ACD) can support patients by providing a diversity of tools for communication, as they progressively lose speech. ALS, in common with other degenerative conditions, introduces an additional challenge for the field of ACD: as the disease progresses, technologies must adapt to different conditions of the user. In early stages, patients may need speech synthesis in a mobile device, if dysarthria is one of the initial symptoms, or keyboard modifications, as weakness in UL increases. When upper limbs’ dysfunction is high, different input technologies may be adapted to capture voluntary control (for example, eye-tracking devices). Despite the enormous advances in the field of Assistive Technologies, in the last decade, difficulties in clinical support for the use of assistive communication devices (ACD) persist. Among the main reasons for these difficulties are lack of assessment tools to evaluate communication needs and determine proper input devices and to indicate changes over disease progression, and absence of clinical evidence that ACD has relevant impact on the quality of life of affected patients. For this set of reasons, support with communication tools is delayed to stages where patients are severely disabled. Often in these stages, patients face additional clinical complications and increased dependence on their caregivers’ decisions, which increase the difficulty in adaptation to new communication tools. This thesis addresses the role of assistive technologies in the quality of life of early-affected patients with ALS. Also, it includes the study of assessment tools that can improve longitudinal evaluation of communication needs of patients with ALS. We longitudinally evaluated a group of 30 patients with bulbar-onset ALS and 17 caregivers, during 2 to 29 months. Patients were assessed during their regular clinical appointments, in the Hospital de Santa Maria-Centro Hospitalar Lisboa_Norte. Evaluation of patients was based on validated instruments for assessing the Quality of Life (QoL) of patients and caregivers, and on methodologies for recording communication and measuring its performance (including speech, handwriting and typing). We tested the impact of early support with ACD on the QoL of patients with ALS, using a randomized, prospective, longitudinal design. Patients were able to learn and improve their skills to use communication tools based on electronic assistive devices. We found a positive impact of ACD in psychological and wellbeing domains of quality of life in patients, as well as in the support and psychological domains in caregivers. We also studied performance of communication (words per minute) using UL. Performance in handwriting may decline faster than performance in typing, supporting the idea that the use of touchscreen-based ACD supports communication for longer than handwriting. From longitudinal recordings of speech and typing activity we could observe that ACD can support tools to detect early markers of bulbar and UL dysfunction in ALS. Methodologies that were used in this research for recording and assessing function in communication can be replicated in the home environment and form part of the original contributions of this research. Implementation of remote monitoring tools in daily use of ACD, based on these methodologies, is discussed. Considering those patients who receive late support for the use of ACD, lack of time or daily support to learn how to control complex input devices may hinder its use. We developed a novel device to explore the detection and control of various residual movements, based on sensors of accelerometry, electromyography and force, as input signals for communication. The aim of this input device was to develop a tool to explore new communication channels in patients with generalized muscle weakness. This research contributed with novel tools from the Engineering field to the study of assistive communication in patients with ALS. Methodologies that were developed in this work can be further applied to the study of the impact of ACD in other neurodegenerative diseases that affect speech and motor control of UL