Don't Confuse! Redrawing GUI Navigation Flow in Mobile Apps for Visually Impaired Users

TL;DR

This paper introduces RGNF, a method inspired by Gestalt principles, to redraw GUI navigation flows in mobile apps, significantly improving navigation coherence and user experience for visually impaired users.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel method, RGNF, that enhances GUI navigation flow for visually impaired users by applying Gestalt principles to improve accessibility and usability.

Findings

Sequence similarity increased from 0.624 to 0.921 after redrawing.

Reachability of GUI components improved from 74.35% to 90.31%.

User study showed positive impact on visually impaired user experience.

Abstract

Mobile applications (apps) are integral to our daily lives, offering diverse services and functionalities. They enable sighted users to access information coherently in an extremely convenient manner. However, it remains unclear if visually impaired users, who rely solely on the screen readers (e.g., Talkback) to navigate and access app information, can do so in the correct and reasonable order. This may result in significant information bias and operational errors. Considering these issues, in this work, we proposed a method named RGNF (Re-draw GUI Navigation Flow). It aimed to enhance the understandability and coherence of accessing the content of each component within the Graphical User Interface (GUI), together with assisting developers in creating well-designed GUI navigation flow (GNF). This method was inspired by the characteristics identified in our preliminary study, where visually impaired users expected navigation to be associated with close position and similar shape of GUI components that were read consecutively. Thus, our method relied on the principles derived from the Gestalt psychological model, aiming to group GUI components into different regions according to the laws of proximity and similarity, thereby redrawing the GNFs. To evaluate the effectiveness of our method, we calculated sequence similarity values before and after redrawing the GNF, and further employed the tools proposed by Alotaibi et al. to measure the reachability of GUI components. Our results demonstrated a substantial improvement in similarity (0.921) compared to the baseline (0.624), together with the reachability (90.31%) compared to the baseline GNF (74.35%). Furthermore, a qualitative user study revealed that our method had a positive effect on providing visually impaired users with an improved user experience.