Title
Designing a text entry multimodal keypad for blind users of touchscreen mobile phones
Abstract
In this report, we share our experience and observations on the challenges blind people face with text entry on touch-based mobile phones, particularly from the perspective of one of the authors, who is blind. To better understand these issues we developed and tested Multimodal Text Input Touchscreen Keypad (MTITK), an audio-tactile text entry prototype based on multitap, which relies on a telephone keypad layout organized into five key groups with distinct audio-tactile feedback. Users explore the screen to identify the current selected key, tap to enter text, and gesture to edit it, while receiving the corresponding voice, audio, and tactile feedback; no additional equipment is necessary in our software-only approach. We implemented a prototype on Android and tested its usability with visually impaired participants; they welcomed its multimodality and the familiar layout, but also expressed the need to increase vibration pattern differentiation and refine the character selection mechanism.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1145/2661334.2661354
ASSETS
Keywords
Field
DocType
mobile devices,input devices and strategies,multimodal interfaces,accessibility,blindness,text entry
Keypad,Multimodality,Android (operating system),Computer science,Gesture,Touchscreen,Usability,Mobile device,Human–computer interaction,Multimedia,Text entry
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
10
0.61
10
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Maria Claudia Buzzi116023.60
Marina Buzzi224233.45
Barbara Leporini342846.45
Amaury Trujillo4265.34