Design of Web-Based Tools to Study Blind People's Touch-Based Interaction with Smartphones

Nowadays touchscreen smartphones are the most common kind of mobile devices. However, gesture-based interaction is a difficult task for most visually impaired people, and even more so for blind people. This difficulty is compounded by the lack of standard gestures and the differences between the main screen reader platforms available on the market. Therefore, our goal is to investigate the differences and preferences in touch gesture performance on smartphones among visually impaired people. During our study, we implemented a web-based wireless system to facilitate the capture of participants’ gestures. In this paper we present an overview of both the study and the system used.