Challenges and Innovations in Designing Accessible User Interfaces for Visually Impaired Users in Modern Touchscreen-Based Mobile OS Ecosystems

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Sähkötekniikan korkeakoulu | Bachelor's thesis
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Date

2024-04-26

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Major/Subject

Digital Systems and Design

Mcode

ELEC3056

Degree programme

Aalto Bachelor's Programme in Science and Technology

Language

en

Pages

38

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Abstract

Our daily activities, such as banking, using social media, following the news and elements related to teaching, are increasingly common on mobile devices. Mobile devices run on many different software and hardware to meet current trends and to meet the needs of every user. As a result, the keyboard-based user interface of mobile devices has gradually moved towards a touchscreen-based approach. Touch screens have developed over time, which is why the contrast, accuracy, response time, refresh rate and size of the screens have developed. For this reason, almost all mobile device software is dependent on perception, which is why many technical innovations have focused on this sense. Therefore, it is possible that human-computer interaction (HCI) as a field has not taken the visually impaired users into consideration so effectively in mobile devices. It is important to consider the visually impaired users in the software development of mobile devices, as there are an estimated 285 million visually impaired people worldwide. This work focuses especially on blind and low vision mobile device users. This thesis was a literature review and it investigated how the visually impaired users have been taken into consideration in the product development of user interfaces for mobile devices and what kind of recent innovations exist that can possibly enhance the accessibility of mobile devices for the visually impaired. In this work, it was found that there are no standard guidelines for accessibility recommendations for the visually impaired on mobile devices, which was required for the accessibility assessment. The thesis created a table of accessibility recommendations for the visually impaired using mobile devices, which were mostly based on WCAG recommendations. In addition to this, it was found that the most common mobile software, such as iOS and Android, have many accessibility features for the visually impaired. However, accessibility was difficult to examine because there was very limited academic research on this topic. It was also difficult to assess the accessibility of mobile devices, as existing automated tools can be unreliable. In the future, users should receive more information and training about accessibility features, as currently most users are not aware of accessibility-enhancing features on their mobile devices or do not know how to use them. In this work, it was also discovered that in recent years there have been many innovations that could be used to improve accessibility. These innovations include, for example, automated description of user interface elements, independent navigation, haptic feedback, gesture-based feedback, and spatial awareness. In order for innovations to be used in the future, more user and usability studies are needed. In the future, the cooperation of researchers from many different fields is also essential to research and develop usability features for the visually impaired, so that the user-friendliness of the features can be guaranteed.

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Supervisor

Ylirisku, Salu

Thesis advisor

Ylirisku, Salu

Keywords

accessibility, Android, blind, emerging technologies, iOS, low vision

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https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:aalto-202405283860

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[kand] Sähkötekniikan korkeakoulu / ELEC