Keyboard Input For People With Vision Related Issues: Literature Survey

Information technology has its applications every where these days. Extensive use of smart phones and internet have made the usage of IT even more inevitable. In every society there are always people with some different needs. If a person is blind or has some vision related issue he or she will have trouble in reading or writing. Smart phones or laptops require focus on the keys for proper input, people with vision related issues can have issues doing that. Braille keyboard input can be one of the solutions to help people who are blind or who have vision related issues. The graphical and visual nature of the smart phone can make the process of interacting with it difficult, Voice over technology is also being offered by smart phone manufacturers in order to help the blind and the people with vision related issues to interact with the smart phone. There are varying physical capabilities in blind users that makes it difficult for them to interact with the smart phone user interface. Screen reading software or voice over have their advantages and disadvantages as they lack physical interaction and are based on audio based guidance, given, ore physical interaction with devices can help people with low vison to interact ion a better way.

There is limited amount of interactions in terms of tactile sense when the user uses a smart phone screen there are several propositions by researchers to increase that level. In Kane et al. , (2013) the authors propose the concept of touch plates, touch plates are additional hardware that may be synchronized with a smart phone or other device they also found in their study that the usage of touch plates can help the blind or people with low vision to interact with the smart phones. There are different perspective by many researchers to make it easier for people with vision issues to interact with devices in a way which suits them.

Another approach is discussed in Buzzi, Buzzi, Leporini, & Trujillo (2014) called Multimodal text input touchscreen keypad feature phones or the phones used before smart phones were used by people with low vision by the help of braille input but that option was minimised with the rise of popularity in smart phones as smart phones come with larger screens with minimum or no physical buttons, this left the smart phone users with the option of screen reading software but with little physical interaction. As in Azenkot, Bennett, & Ladner (2013) screen reading software can assist people with vision issues but in will require them to focus on the speech and it would be difficult to operate in busy places, eyes free is a method introduced in this paper this can help blind users as while incorporating with the aforementioned method the user will not need to depend on the visual elements on the screen of the smart phone, and it can also be operated in busy places.

Blind people have not been able to use smart phones extensively as they find some obstacles to use them this has kept the blind people to make the smart phones their prime choice. There are number of factors that do not encourage the blind users to use smart phones the complexity of apps discourages the people with low vision to use smart phones this also includes text input methods if alternative methods are provided for text input this can help restore confidence in people with low vision to use smart phones comprehensively in their lives. It is not easy for blind people to use the smart phones without the accessibility mode and additional software and hardware.

Additional devices that can be made to work with mobile devices to help people with low vision can also provide solutions to the problems.