A Case Study to Enhance the Smartphone’s: Accessibility for Visually Impaired People

Défense de mémoire de Simon Desart

Nowadays, the use of mobile devices still raises a number of challenges that prevent people with visual impairments from operating their devices efficiently. This thesis aims to provide a global understanding of several concepts as multi-modal interfaces but also of the behaviours and concerns of this specific group of users. A new way to interact with a smartphone is proposed by allowing the user to directly access some functionalities through short-cuts. A prototype, inspired by this vision, was developed and was evaluated with the targeted users in order to verify if it can really improve the accessibility of mobile devices for the visu-ally impaired. With this in mind, this thesis also presents a user study where the suitability of the proposed approach was assessed.A performance compari-son between the prototype and existing SMS applications was also conducted. The prototype was received positively by the participants. Moreover, it also supported better performance in tasks that involved text editing.

Keywords: multimodal interaction, accessibility, visually impaired, eye-free interaction.

Contact : Isabelle Daelman - 4966 - isabelle.daelman@unamur.be
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