Abstract
We report the results of a study on the learnability of haptic icons used in a system for incoming-call identification in mobile phones. The aim was to explore the feasibility of using haptic icons to create new assistive technologies for people with visual impairments. We compared the performance and satisfaction of users with different visual capacities (visually impaired vs. sighted) and using different learning processes (unimodal vs. multimodal). A better recognition rate and user experience were observed for the visually impaired than for sighted users and for multimodal rather than unimodal learning processes.
Acknowledgments
This research was part of the Spanish project Interfaces de relación entre el entorno y las personas con discapacidad (INREDIS, http://www.inredis.es), led by Technosite and funded by Centro para el Desarrollo Tecnológico Industrial (CDTI, CENIT/INGENIO 2010). The opinions expressed in this paper are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the project's partners or of CDTI.