Investigating the Effectiveness of Assistive Technologies on Situationally Impaired Users

Abstract. Mobile devices are used in increasingly demanding contexts, which compete for the visual resources required for an effective interaction. This is more obvious when considering current visually demanding user interfaces. In this work, we propose using solutions initially designed for blind people in order to ease the visual demand of current mobile interfaces. A comparative user study was conducted with 23 sighted volunteers who performed text-entry tasks with three methods, QWERTY, VoiceOver alike and NavTouch in three mobility conditions. We first analyzed the effect of walking and visual demand, followed by the effect of using assistive technologies in mobile contexts. Results show that traditional QWERTY keyboard outperforms alternative text-entry methods for the blind, as users prefer visual feedback over their auditory counterpart. Moreover assistive technologies and their interaction processes revealed to be cognitively demanding and therefore inadequate in mobile contexts. These findings suggest that technology transfer should be performed with caution, and adaptations must be done to account for differences in users’ capabilities