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

Authors:
Shaun Kane, Jacob, Richard Ladner

Occupation:

Shaun K. Kane is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland

Jacob O. Wobbrock is currently an Associate Professor at the University of Washington.

Richard E. Ladner is currently a Professor at the University of Washington 

Location:

Published in the CHI '11 Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference on Human factors in computing systems at NYC

Summary
Hypothesis:
This paper focused on the different styles of gestures between sighted and blind people when used touch based devices

Methods:
In order to test the hypothesis the researchers decided to conduct two tests. The first test consisted of using both sighted and blind people and told them to invent several of their own gestures that can be used to interact as a standard task on a computer or a mobile device. The researchers read a description of the action required and the result from such action for each of the command. Each user created two different gestures for every command. Afterwards each of these gestures were looked over to see usability and accessibility.

The second test was to determine if blind people actually perform gestures in a different manner or if the gestures used are entirely different from the sighted users. In order to conduct this all of the users did the same set of gestures on the device. The researcher described what the intended purpose of the gesture was and the users attempted to re create this based on the instruction given

Results:
In the first test the researchers found that a blind person's gesture has more strokes than the sighted person. Also the blind people made more use of the edges in the tablet when positioning his/her gestures. Multi touch gestures were more occasionally used compared to the sight people as well. The second test saw very little difference in how easily the users recreated the gestures between the blind and the sighted. It was also seen that blind people made bigger overall gestures compared to the sighted people. It was also noted that blind users took much longer to perform the gestures and tended to be less straight.

Content:
The paper goes into how touch screen gestures can be improved and how it can also be applied for blind people. The purpose of the experiments in general was to gauge how differently the sighted people interact with a devices compared to blind people. As the researchers thought there was predictable amount of difference when it came to overall speed and gesture sizes. This can potentially create devices that can be viable to both blind and sighted people.

Discussion:
I thought the article was quite interesting as it talked about a facet of people that are often ignored in my opinion. I believe that this findings can help create new products that can allow even blind people to interact with and i hope that this research will help open further research into such topic.