Exploring the Non-Visual Acquisition of Targets on Touch Phones and Tablets

Abstract. Touch-based mobile phones and tablets have started to be shipped with built-in accessibility features, fostering the inclusion of disabled people. Particularly, blind people can use these devices resorting to screen reading software commonly along with a painless exploration approach. However, for a large part of the population, a first approach to these devices is still challenging and a future reigned by touch surfaces presents as daunting. The success with such gadgets varies and is highly dependent on the user’s abilities. To ease a blind person’s experience with mobile devices a better understanding of touch interface demands is required. In this paper, we present a study with 41 blind people where they performed low-level target acquisition tasks with different devices. Results revealed that differences in device size and the simple addition of a physical border are likely to deeply affect user performance. These differ-ences should be further explored to foster inclusion