A Review of Smartphone's Text Entry for Visually Impaired

Abstract

Smartphones are becoming more popular among the visually impaired people due to its inbuilt screen readers (e.g. TalkBack, VoiceOver). These screen readers enable visually impaired people to access some of the smartphone's features. There are other functions which can be inaccessible, time-consuming, and mental-workload inducing. Among these aforementioned functions is text entry. The text entry on smartphones using a virtual keyboard is inherently an ocular task as it requires target hitting accuracy. There has been a significant amount of research regarding text entry on smartphones for visually impaired. The purpose of this study is to conduct a new research from HCI perspective about the various types of text entry methods in smartphones for visually impaired. The systematic search is carried out in 6 databases to find the relevant papers, during the time frame of 2010–2017, to study the recent developments in smartphone text entry methods for visually impaired. This search resulted in 16 research papers, which helped in answering the research questions adapted from Siqueira et al. [1], because this paper not only serves as a guideline for SLRs related to braille-based text entry, but it is also a significant contribution in this field, and the main author of this study has more than 21000 citations. Our study not only presents a concise description of various text entry methods, but it also lists 22 research and design consideration for text entry solutions.