Toucha11y: Making Inaccessible Public Touchscreens Accessible
Toucha11y: Making Inaccessible Public Touchscreens Accessible
Loading...
Files
Publication or External Link
Date
2023-04-19
Authors
Li, Jiasheng
Yan, Zeyu
Shah, Arush
Lazar, Jonathan
Peng, Huaishu
Advisor
Citation
Jiasheng Li, Zeyu Yan, Arush Shah, Jonathan Lazar, and Huaishu Peng. 2023. Toucha11y: Making Inaccessible Public Touchscreens Accessible. In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’23), April 23–28, 2023, Hamburg, Germany. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 13 pages.
Abstract
Despite their growing popularity, many public kiosks with touchscreens are inaccessible to blind people. Toucha11y is a working
prototype that allows blind users to use existing inaccessible touchscreen kiosks independently and with little effort. Toucha11y consists of a mechanical bot that can be instrumented to an arbitrary
touchscreen kiosk by a blind user and a companion app on their
smartphone. The bot, once attached to a touchscreen, will recognize
its content, retrieve the corresponding information from a database,
and render it on the user’s smartphone. As a result, a blind person
can use the smartphone’s built-in accessibility features to access
content and make selections. The mechanical bot will detect and
activate the corresponding touchscreen interface. We present the
system design of Toucha11y along with a series of technical evaluations. Through a user study, we found out that Toucha11y could
help blind users operate inaccessible touchscreen devices.