Recommendations on a Test Infrastructure for Evaluation of Touchscreen Assistive Technology for Visually Impaired Users

Abstract

Mobile technologies’ touchscreen allows the use of choreography of gestures to interact with the user interface. Relevant aspects in mobile technology design become crucial when targeting users with disabilities. For instance, when assistive technology is designed to support speech interaction between visually impaired users and a system, accessibility and ease-of-use of such technology should be included in the usability and technical evaluation of their effectiveness. This paper presents the analysis of the technical and physical infrastructure of a controlled laboratory environment for user evaluations made in the research project “Visually impaired users touching the screen - A user evaluation of assistive technology” where VoiceOver, a screen reader in Apple Inc. products was tested. The paper reports on challenges related to the use of the test infrastructure, such as how to obtain valuable data when interactive high-speed gestures are performed and how to optimise the recording and syn-chronisation between audio and video data. The lessons learned by the research group showed that there are effective alternatives for each challenge, and these should be customised for each particular test, type of participants and device.