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Investigating Microinteractions for People with Visual Impairments and the Potential Role of On-Body Interaction

Published: 19 October 2017 Publication History

Abstract

For screenreader users who are blind or visually impaired (VI), today's mobile devices, while reasonably accessible, are not necessarily efficient. This inefficiency may be especially problematic for microinteractions, which are brief but high-frequency interactions that take only a few seconds for sighted users to complete (e.g., checking the weather or for new messages). One potential solution to support efficient non-visual microinteractions is on-body input, which appropriates the user's own body as the interaction medium. In this paper, we address two related research questions: How well are microinteractions currently supported for VI users' How should on-body interaction be designed to best support microinteractions for this user group? We conducted two studies: (1) an online survey to compare current microinteraction use between VI and sighted users (N=117); and (2) an in-person study where 12 VI screenreader users qualitatively evaluated a real-time on-body interaction system that provided three contrasting input designs. Our findings suggest that efficient microinteractions are not currently well-supported for VI users, at least using manual input, which highlights the need for new interaction approaches. On-body input offers this potential and the qualitative evaluation revealed tradeoffs with different on-body interaction techniques in terms of perceived efficiency, learnability, social acceptability, and ability to use on the go.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      ASSETS '17: Proceedings of the 19th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility
      October 2017
      450 pages
      ISBN:9781450349260
      DOI:10.1145/3132525
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Published: 19 October 2017

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      Author Tags

      1. microinteraction
      2. mobile
      3. on-body interaction
      4. visual impairments
      5. wearable technology

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      • Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs

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      ASSETS '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 28 of 126 submissions, 22%;
      Overall Acceptance Rate 436 of 1,556 submissions, 28%

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