Tapping with out seeing: Making touchscreens accessible

Trendy units rely closely on touchscreens as a result of they permit for dynamic interfaces that aren’t doable with typical tactile buttons. However these interfaces current a problem for folks with sure disabilities. An individual with imaginative and prescient loss, for instance, won’t be capable of see the display screen’s content material or its digital buttons in any respect. To make touchscreens extra accessible, a group of engineers from the College of Michigan developed this particular telephone case referred to as BrushLens.

This case expands a smartphone so as to add a matrix of actuators or capacitive contact simulator pads. The previous work with all types of touchscreens (together with resistive), whereas the latter solely work with capacitive touchscreens — although these are the commonest sort at present. The smartphone’s personal digicam and sensors let it detect its place on a bigger touchscreen, so it will possibly information a person to a digital button after which press that button itself.

The prototype {hardware} contains an Arduino Nano 33 IoT board to manage the actuators and/or capacitive contact factors. It receives its instructions from the smartphone through Bluetooth® Low Power.

For that to work, the smartphone should perceive the goal touchscreen and talk the content material to the person. That communication is feasible utilizing current text-to-voice methods, however analyzing goal touchscreens is harder. Ideally, UI designers would come with some form of identifier so the person’s smartphone can question display screen content material and button positions. Nonetheless, that’s an added expense and would require rebuilds of current interfaces. For that purpose, BrushLens contains some capacity to research touchscreens and their content material.

It is a very early prototype, however the idea has a substantial amount of potential for making a world filled with touchscreens extra accessible to these residing with disabilities.

Picture credit score: Chen Liang, doctoral scholar, College of Michigan’s Pc Science and Engineering