Paper Info
Title
Getting Smartphones to Talkback: Understanding the Smartphone Adoption Process of Blind Users
Abstract
The advent of system-wide accessibility services on mainstream touch-based smartphones has been a major point of inclusion for blind and visually impaired people. Ever since, researchers aimed to improve the accessibility of specific tasks, such text-entry and gestural interaction. However, little work aimed to understand and improve the overall accessibility of these devices in real world settings. In this paper, we present an eight-week long study with five novice blind participants where we seek to understand major concerns, expectations, challenges, barriers, and experiences with smartphones. The study included pre-adoption and weekly interviews, weekly controlled task assessments, and in-the wild system-wide usage. Our results show that mastering these devices is an arduous and long task, confirming the users' initial concerns. We report on accessibility barriers experienced throughout the study, which could not be encountered in task-based laboratorial settings. Finally, we discuss how smartphones are being integrated in everyday activities and highlight the need for better adoption support tools.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1145/2700648.2809842
ACM Conference on Supporting Group Work
Keywords
Field
DocType
Blind,Novice,Smartphone,Adoption,Touchscreen,Challenges
Internet privacy,Computer science,Touchscreen,Mainstream,Multimedia
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
19
0.83
14
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
André Rodrigues1534.57
Kyle Montague214721.54
Hugo Nicolau338134.33
Tiago Guerreiro436645.90