Mobile brailler: Making touch-screen typing accessible to visually impaired users

For visually impaired users, existing touch-screen keyboards are cumbersome and time-consuming. We present several prototype methods of text entry on a modern touch screen mobile phone that are based on the Braille alphabet and thus are convenient for visually impaired users. We evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of our Braille-based methods through a user study with 15 participants. Our results indicate that a spatially-oriented method of entering Braille using a single finger was preferred since it balances simplicity with accuracy. We discuss how insights revealed by our user study can help us further refine and improve the preferred method.