Visual Impairment Blindness Analysis

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Visually impaired individuals are a growing segment of our population. However, social constructs are not always designed with this group of people in mind, making the development of better electronic accessibility tools essential in order to fulfill their daily needs. Traditionally, such assistive tools came in the form of expensive, specialized and at times heavy devices which visually impaired individuals had to independently look after and carry around.The current thesis describes the design, implementation, evaluation and user-study based analysis of a mobile application which helps visually impaired people for fast text entry on a modern touch screen mobile phone. Multi-touch screen is a relatively new and revolutionary technology in…show more content…
INTRODUCTION Visual impairment blindness can be defined as the collective term “Vision Loss” which refers to either the loss of the ability to see, or vision reduction. The terms “Low Vision”, partially sighted, or visually impaired, can be used for a person who has not lost the capability to see, but whose vision is significantly reduced compared to normal vision. Much of our social infrastructure is organized with the premise that all members of society have their full vision. Most countries maintain costly transportation systems which rely mainly, if not exclusively, on the ability of sighted car owners to drive through an elaborate road network, whilst urban and rural regions alike are kept adequately lit all throughout the night for the sole benefit of sighted inhabitants. Given these organizational and financial priorities, the needs of visually impaired citizens are at times not addressed adequately, a fact which creates several challenges which visually impaired individuals have to deal with on a daily basis. However, some of the obstacles encountered by visually impaired people can potentially be overcome through simple and cheap assistive software which runs on modern mobile…show more content…
Being mostly software driven makes these phones highly customizable for all sorts of users including blind and visually impaired people. In this research, we present new interface layouts for multi-touch screen mobile phones that enable visionless people to enter text in the form of Braille cells. Braille is the only way for these people to directly read and write without getting help from any extra assistive instruments. It will be more convenient and interesting for them to be provided with facilities to interact with new technologies using their language, Braille. We started with a literature review on existing eyes-free text entry methods and also text input devices, to find out their strengths and weaknesses. At this stage we were aiming at identifying the difficulties that unsighted people faced when working with current text entry methods. Then we conducted questionnaire surveys as the quantitative method and interviews as the qualitative method of our user study to get familiar with users’ needs and expectations. At the same time we studied the Braille language in detail and examined currently available multi-touch mobile phone feedbacks. At the designing stage, we first investigated different possible ways of entering a Braille “cell” on a multi-touch screen, regarding available input techniques and also considering the Braille structure. Then, we developed six different
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