Perceptions of Blind Adults on Non-Visual Mobile Text Entry

TL;DR

This study explores blind adults' experiences with mobile text input, highlighting challenges like dictation accuracy and error correction, and evaluates a new non-visual input method to inform future improvements.

Contribution

The paper provides insights into blind users' mobile text input challenges and evaluates a novel non-visual input method, proposing five key directions for future research.

Findings

Dictation is often inaccurate for blind users.

Most participants prefer manual word entry over predictions.

Learning new input methods is a significant barrier.

Abstract

Text input on mobile devices without physical keys can be challenging for people who are blind or low-vision. We interview 12 blind adults about their experiences with current mobile text input to provide insights into what sorts of interface improvements may be the most beneficial. We identify three primary themes that were experiences or opinions shared by participants: the poor accuracy of dictation, difficulty entering text in noisy environments, and difficulty correcting errors in entered text. We also discuss an experimental non-visual text input method with each participant to solicit opinions on the method and probe their willingness to learn a novel method. We find that the largest concern was the time required to learn a new technique. We find that the majority of our participants do not use word predictions while typing but instead find it faster to finish typing words manually. Finally, we distill five future directions for non-visual text input: improved dictation, less reliance on or improved audio feedback, improved error correction, reducing the barrier to entry for new methods, and more fluid non-visual word predictions.