Blog #29 Usable gestures for blind people: understanding preference and performance

Usable gestures for blind people: understanding preference and performance

Authors : Shaun K. Kane, Jacob O. Wobbrock, and Richard E. Ladner

Authors Bios :

• Shaun K. Kane:Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland and received his PhD from the University of Washington.
• Jacob O. Wobbrock: Associate Professor at the University of Washington specializing in human-computer interaction.
• Richard E. Ladner: Professor at the University of Washington and has a PhD in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley.Venue : This paper was presented at the CHI '11 Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference on Human factors in computing systems 

Summary
Hypothesis:
Since blind and sighted people have different perceptions and the researchers believed that  touch screen gestures from blind and sighted people would have different ways of performing similar gestures. By knowing these differences one could help designers of applications to be more applicable for everyone and not just the sighted.

Methods:The research was broken into two parts.

First, they had 10 blind participants invent and tell the researchers how they would use gestures on the tablet. And the 10 participants that were not blind were used as the baseline to compare the differences. Each person created a gesture for every command, like exit, delete, copy, paste, move up & down, etc. 

The Seconds part of the study, they were asked to perform the same gestures for certain actions and rate them on a Liker scale.

Results:

The blind found that their made up gestures were better suited for the blind then the sighted people. Text-entry gestures produced mixed results with keyboard being the preferred method by both blind and sighted participants. They also found that the blind group preferred landmarks or performing gestures close to the screen.

Conclusion: 

Based on the results they concluded that they now have a new bases to make applications for both the blind and for the sighted. 

Discussion: 

I feel the researchers did a good job to find out and bring the gap between the blind and the sighted. Since i don't know or deal with blind every day, as a programmer i wouldn't even think or know how to attempt to design a blind person application, and having it in the general standard for applications would be best for the greater good of people.