Development of a smartphone interface to support the visually impaired.

Abstract: The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 2 billion people in the world will be aged 60 and over by the year 2050. Along with the aging process, there will be declination of sensory, physical and cognitive factors. Vision impairment is a worldwide problem faced by people of all ages. The usage of smartphones has escalated exponentially. Smartphones are now equipped with features like text to speech converters, speech interpreters, voice guided navigation, and intelligent assistants. Appropriately designed, these can be valuable tools for the visually impaired. However, despite the advanced accessibility implemented in the smartphones, the elderly still seems to prefer ordinary phones which have physical buttons. The aim of this thesis was twofold; (1) to identify factors hindering the elderly and their use of smartphones, and (2) to develop smartphone interfaces to improve accessibility. Two Android applications were developed in this thesis. The Magnifier is a magnification tool for physical objects and text. EyesFree is a text to speech service that reads out the screen content to the user. The requirements for the apps were elicited by studying existing applications and also by interviewing potential users. EyesFree and Magnifier were evaluated using the think aloud protocol method and the results show that they are useful applications for the visually impaired. The Android operating system provides a number of accessibility features and services to help the users with different abilities to navigate the device easily. Paradoxically, these features are quite difficult to use, for example, they are not easily launched and closed. The meta application and user interface of EyesFree exemplifies how users can access the internal features of the OS such as the speech services more effectively.