Navigating the Aural Web: Augmenting User Experience for Visually Impaired and Mobile Users

poster abstractThe current web navigation paradigm structures interaction around vision and thus hampers users in two eyes-free scenarios: mobile computing and information access for the visually impaired. Users in both scenarios are unable to navigate complex information architectures efficiently because of the strictly linear perceptual bandwidth of the aural channel. To combat this problem, we are conducting a long-term research program aimed at establishing novel design strategies that can augment the aural navigation while users browse complex information architectures typical of the web. A pervasive problem in designing for web accessibility (especially for screen reader users) is to provide efficient access to a large collection of contents, which is manifested in long lists indexing the underlying contents. Cognitively managing the interaction with long lists is cumbersome in the aural paradigm because users need to listen attentively to each list item to make a decision about what link to follow and then select a link. For every non relevant page selected, screen reader users need to go back to the list to select another page. Our most recent study studies compared the performance of index-based web navigation to guided-tour navigation (navigation without lists) for screen-reader users. Guided-tour navigation allows users to move directly back and forth across the content pages of a collection, bypassing lists. An experiment (N=10), conducted at the Indiana School for the Blind and Visually Impaired (ISBVI), examined these web navigation strategies during fact-finding tasks. Guided-tour significantly reduced time on task, number of pages visited, number of keystrokes, and perceived cognitive effort while enhancing the navigational experience. By augmenting existing navigational methods for screen-reader users, our research offers design strategies to web designers to improve web accessibility without costly site redesign. This research material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant #1018054

UEFI BIOS Accessibility for the Visually Impaired

People with some kind of disability face a high level of difficulty for everyday tasks because, in many cases, accessibility was not considered necessary when the task or process was designed. An example of this scenario is a computer's BIOS configuration screens, which do not consider the specific needs, such as screen readers, of visually impaired people. This paper proposes the idea that it is possible to make the pre-operating system environment accessible to visually impaired people. We report our work-in-progress in creating a screen reader prototype, accessing audio cards compatible with the High Definition Audio specification in systems running UEFI compliant firmware.Comment: 6 page

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

Feeling what you hear: tactile feedback for navigation of audio graphs

Access to digitally stored numerical data is currently very limited for sight impaired people. Graphs and visualizations are often used to analyze relationships between numerical data, but the current methods of accessing them are highly visually mediated. Representing data using audio feedback is a common method of making data more accessible, but methods of navigating and accessing the data are often serial in nature and laborious. Tactile or haptic displays could be used to provide additional feedback to support a point-and-click type interaction for the visually impaired. A requirements capture conducted with sight impaired computer users produced a review of current accessibility technologies, and guidelines were extracted for using tactile feedback to aid navigation. The results of a qualitative evaluation with a prototype interface are also presented. Providing an absolute position input device and tactile feedback allowed the users to explore the graph using tactile and proprioceptive cues in a manner analogous to point-and-click techniques

Creating a transportation app for visually impaired people

Client for this thesis was Bernmobil. Bernmobil provides public transportation services in the Bern area by busses and trams. The idea for this assignment came from the interest to provide services for a specific target group, visually impaired people. The goal of this thesis was to develop a concept of an assistive mobile application for visually impaired users to help them use public transportation by themselves. Literature research was used as the research method, which was based on the previous projects and reports on this field, including guidelines of the assistive application development and documentations about existing public transportation applications for visually impaired. The analysis and research for this project started by defining the problems, which visually impaired face when using public transportation. From a list of existing problems, four were picked which were found to be the most relevant. Guidelines for assistive application development define what is to be taken into consideration when developing an application for visually impaired users. Research of existing applications were used to define which features this kind of application includes, where they are used, and how the application for the visually impaired works. The conceptual design and interface of this application was based on the literature research. The four major features of the conceptual application (planning the route, information about arriving vehicle, information while on board and information about abnormalities on the route) solve the problems defined by the literature research. Interaction between user and the application works by screen reader and touch-based gestures. The interface is designed to be simple, only including features that are relevant and necessary. As a conclusion, companies and developers have made big efforts to design assistive applications for visually impaired. There is a lot of research concerning this matter on the general level. On the field of public transportation, there is still work to do. There are some public transportation applications that work locally in different parts of the world. World-wide there are only a few public transportation applications but they are not designed specifically for visually impaired users. So there is a gap to fill for Bernmobil to provide more accessible public transportation for their customers