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Access overlays: improving non-visual access to large touch screens for blind users

Published: 16 October 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Many touch screens remain inaccessible to blind users, and those approaches to providing access that do exist offer minimal support for interacting with large touch screens or spatial data. In this paper, we introduce a set of three software-based access overlays intended to improve the accessibility of large touch screen interfaces, specifically interactive tabletops. Our access overlays are called edge projection, neighborhood browsing, and touch-and-speak. In a user study, 14 blind users compared access overlays to an implementation of Apple's VoiceOver screen reader. Our results show that two of our techniques were faster than VoiceOver, that participants correctly answered more questions about the screen's layout using our techniques, and that participants overwhelmingly preferred our techniques. We developed several applications demonstrating the use of access overlays, including an accessible map kiosk and an accessible board game.

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Cited By

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cover image ACM Conferences
UIST '11: Proceedings of the 24th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology
October 2011
654 pages
ISBN:9781450307161
DOI:10.1145/2047196
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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Publication History

Published: 16 October 2011

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Author Tags

  1. accessibility
  2. blindness
  3. touch screens
  4. visual impairments

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UIST '11 Paper Acceptance Rate 67 of 262 submissions, 26%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 561 of 2,567 submissions, 22%

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The 38th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology
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  • (2025)Touch Table Interfaces in Therapeutic Rehabilitation: A Systematic ReviewInternational Journal of Human–Computer Interaction10.1080/10447318.2024.2422677(1-15)Online publication date: 17-Jan-2025
  • (2024)Speech-based Mark for Data SonificationProceedings of the 26th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility10.1145/3663548.3688514(1-5)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2024
  • (2024)TADA: Making Node-link Diagrams Accessible to Blind and Low-Vision PeopleProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642222(1-20)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • (2024)FetchAid: Making Parcel Lockers More Accessible to Blind and Low Vision People With Deep-learning Enhanced Touchscreen Guidance, Error-Recovery Mechanism, and AR-based Search SupportProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642213(1-15)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • (2024)MotorEase: Automated Detection of Motor Impairment Accessibility Issues in Mobile App UIsProceedings of the IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/3597503.3639167(1-13)Online publication date: 20-May-2024
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  • (2023)BrushLens: Hardware Interaction Proxies for Accessible Touchscreen Interface ActuationProceedings of the 36th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology10.1145/3586183.3606730(1-17)Online publication date: 29-Oct-2023
  • (2023)µGeT: Multimodal eyes-free text selection technique combining touch interaction and microgesturesProceedings of the 25th International Conference on Multimodal Interaction10.1145/3577190.3614131(594-603)Online publication date: 9-Oct-2023
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