Making Spatial Information Accessible on Touchscreens for Users who are Blind and Visually Impaired

Touchscreens have become a de facto standard of input for mobile devices as they most optimally use the limited input and output space that is imposed by their form factor. In recent years, people who are blind and visually impaired have been increasing their usage of smartphones and touchscreens. Although basic access is available, there are still many accessibility issues left to deal with in order to bring full inclusion to this population. One of the important challenges lies in accessing and creating of spatial information on touchscreens. The work presented here provides three new techniques, using three different modalities, for accessing spatial information on touchscreens. The first system makes geometry and diagram creation accessible on a touchscreen through the use of text-to-speech and gestural input. This first study is informed by a qualitative study of how people who are blind and visually impaired currently access and create graphs and diagrams. The second system makes directions through maps accessible using multiple vibration sensors without any sound or visual output. The third system investigates the use of binaural sound on a touchscreen to make various types of applications accessible such as physics simulations, astronomy, and video games

Comparison Between BlindLogin and Other Graphical Password Authentication Systems

This pilot study was done to evaluate the picture superiority effect on the memorability and usability of BlindLogin based on the Usability-Deployability-Security (UDS) Model and to compare the results with other graphical password authentication systems found in literature. The results from this pilot study indicated that the visually impaired users generally thought that BlindLogin was better than the textual password based on all the UDS Model usability criteria. The results further indicated that BlindLogin was significantly better than textual passwords in four usability criteria (Memorywise Effortless, Infrequent Errors, Efficient to Use and Physically Effortless). For Memorywise-Effortless, BlindLogin (p < 0.012) is more significant than Image PassTiles (p < 0.013) and much more significant than Object PassTiles (p < 0.045). For Infrequent Errors, BlindLogin (p < 0.015) is almost as significant as Passpoints (p < 0.013). The security of BlindLogin was also assessed by tabulating the password space and launching a dictionary attack and a brute-force attack using the capabilities of the cloud. The results showed that it would take about 48188.59 years to brute-force a BlindLogin password using the capabilities of the cloud, which is better than DAS (541.8 years) and Grid Selection (541.8 years). As currently graphical authentication systems designed for the visually impaired have yet to be found in literature, BlindLogin has been shown to be a memorable and usable graphical authentication system for visually impaired users as compared to other graphical password systems which was designed only for sighted users on the mobile platform