The Accessibility of Mobile Health Sensors for Blind Users

Mobile health (mHealth) applications are becoming popular and could be useful for people who are blind as they allow the data from mainstream health sensors to be accessed on the smartphone. However, in order for the health sensors to be accessible, the smartphone applications must be accessible. In early 2014, we conducted a survey of the accessibility of nine mHealth applications for the iPhone and found that none of them met our criteria (based on the guidelines provided by Apple and Section 508) for being accessible. We found that the majority of the accessibility problems encountered were relatively simple and believe that it would only take a small amount of effort on the part of developers to fulfill the potential for mHealth applications to make mainstream health sensors fully accessible to blind users of smartphones.