Published in

Springer, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, p. 100-107, 2011

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-23774-4_10

Links

Tools

Export citation

Search in Google Scholar

BrailleType: Unleashing Braille over Touch Screen Mobile Phones

This paper is available in a repository.
This paper is available in a repository.

Full text: Download

Red circle
Preprint: archiving forbidden
Orange circle
Postprint: archiving restricted
Red circle
Published version: archiving forbidden
Data provided by SHERPA/RoMEO

Abstract

The emergence of touch screen devices poses a new set of challenges regarding text-entry. These are more obvious when considering blind people, as touch screens lack the tactile feedback they are used to when interacting with devices. The available solutions to enable non-visual text-entry resort to a wide set of targets, complex interaction techniques or unfamiliar layouts. We propose BrailleType, a text-entry method based on the Braille alphabet. BrailleType avoids multi-touch gestures in favor of a more simple single-finger interaction, featuring few and large targets. We performed a user study with fifteen blind subjects, to assess this method's performance against Apple's VoiceOver approach. BrailleType although slower, was significantly easier and less error prone. Results suggest that the target users would have a smoother adaptation to BrailleType than to other more complex methods.