Visual Impairments and Mobile Touchscreen Interaction: State-of-the-Art, Causes of Visual Impairment, and Design Guidelines

ABSTRACT

This article identifies, catalogues, and discusses factors that are responsible for causing visual impairment of either a pathological or situational nature for touch and gesture input on smart mobile devices. Because the vast majority of interactions with touchscreen devices are highly visual in nature, any factor that prevents a clear, direct view of the mobile device’s screen can have potential negative implications on the effectiveness and efficiency of the interaction. This work presents the first overview of such factors, which are grouped in a catalogue of users, devices, and environments. The elements of the catalogue (e.g., psychological factors that relate to the user, or the social acceptability of mobile device use in public that relates to the social environment) are discussed in the context of current eye pathology classification from medicine and the recent literature in human–computer interaction on mobile touch and gesture input for people with visual impairments, for which a state-of-the-art survey is conducted. The goal of this work is to help systematize research on visual impairments and mobile touchscreen interaction by providing a catalogue-based view of the main causes of visual impairments affecting touch and gesture input on smart mobile devices.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for thoughtful comments and suggestions, Sam Waller for granting permission to include pictures processed with the Vision and Hearing Impairment Simulator (Figures 1 and 5), and Gabriel Cramariuc for photo credit for Figure 7.

Funding

This work was supported from the project “Gesture interfaces for visually-impairing interaction contexts,” project no. PN-II-RU-TE-2014-4-1187, financed by UEFISCDI, Romania. The work was carried out in the Machine Intelligence and Information Visualization Lab (MintViz) of the MANSiD Research Center. The infrastructure was provided by the University of Suceava and was partially supported from the project “Integrated center for research, development and innovation in Advanced Materials, Nanotechnologies, and Distributed Systems for fabrication and control,” No. 671/09.04.2015, Sectoral Operational Program for Increase of the Economic Competitiveness, co-funded from the European Regional Development Fund.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported from the project “Gesture interfaces for visually-impairing interaction contexts,” project no. PN-II-RU-TE-2014-4-1187, financed by UEFISCDI, Romania. The work was carried out in the Machine Intelligence and Information Visualization Lab (MintViz) of the MANSiD Research Center. The infrastructure was provided by the University of Suceava and was partially supported from the project “Integrated center for research, development and innovation in Advanced Materials, Nanotechnologies, and Distributed Systems for fabrication and control,” No. 671/09.04.2015, Sectoral Operational Program for Increase of the Economic Competitiveness, co-funded from the European Regional Development Fund.

Notes on contributors

Radu-Daniel Vatavu

Radu-Daniel Vatavu is a professor of computer science at the University of Suceava, where he conducts research in human–computer interaction, ambient intelligence, and entertainment computing. He received a PhD in computer science from the University of Lille 1 and the University of Suceava (2008) and a HDR in computer science (2014).