Haptic reference cues to support the exploration of touchscreen mobile devices by blind users

Mobile devices are currently used for an increasing number of activities. However, their use is still a challenge for blind users. Main problems are especially due to the interaction via touchscreen and the lack of hardware keys for quickly detecting or activating functions. In this paper we investigated the use of the tactile channel to make interaction with touch-based mobile devices easier for blind users. After introducing common touchscreen usability problems, we presented our proposal aimed at enriching the user interface with haptic points to aid blind user orientation on the main sections of a user interface. Starting from two use cases, in order to set-up the proposed solution we have developed a simple controller prototype, based on Arduino open-hardware.