Evaluation of touchscreen assistive technology for visually disabled users

Touchscreen assistive technology is designed to support speech interaction between visually disabled people and mobile devices, allowing the use of a choreography of gestures to interact with a touch user interface. This paper presents the evaluation of VoiceOver, a screen reader in Apple Inc. products, made in the research project Visually impaired users touching the screen- A user evaluation of assistive technology together with six visually disabled test participants. The aim was to identify challenges related to the performance of the gestures for screen interaction and evaluate the system response to the gestures. The main results showed that most of the hand gestures were easy to perform for the test participants. The system adequately responded to gesture interaction, but some inconsistent responses associated to several functionalities and lack of information were found.