A New Touchscreen Cover for Braille-Based Data Entry on Mobile Devices

The emerging advances in mobile technology, along with the anticipated global increase in the blind and low-vision population, emphasize the importance of introducing this community to such technology as an effective and low-cost communication tool. Aiming to enable blind and deaf-blind individuals to use mobile devices, many tactile-based methods and systems have been presented in literature over the last decade. Although these methods are well-regarded, their limitations include the need for object localization on mobile devices’ embedded touchscreens and the requirement to apply multiple gesture types, often involving several fingers from both hands. Addressing these limitations, this work presents a framework offering a new tactile-based communication method for blind individuals on mobile devices, with a touchscreen cover as a core component. The invented cover splits the touchscreen into eight equally-sized cells — six for data entry and two for control input — and provides an effective solution to localization and navigation challenges faced by blind individuals on touchscreens. In particular, the proposed framework enables Braille-based character entry. An Android app has also been developed to identify entered characters and save them for further processing. The proposed framework was tested at a foundation providing care for blind and low-vision individuals. Two-phases experiments, preliminary and final, were designed and conducted with ten participants. Experimental analysis based on measuring data entry time and input error indicates that the proposed framework performs well. Furthermore, two participant surveys were conducted prior and post the experiments to justify the calculated performance measures, asses cognitive load, and verify the usability and learnability of the proposed framework.