TetraMail: a usable email client for blind people

Abstract

Electronic Mail has become an essential tool of communication and collaboration for sighted, visually impaired, and blind people. However, due to inconsistent interface design, lack of logical order of navigational items, the diverse set of screen sizes and orientations, complicated text-entry layouts, and inadequate mapping of haptic feedback, the existing email-related activities on smartphone contribute to several issues. In addition, blind people also confront problems in precisely accessing the non-visual items on touchscreen interfaces to perform common email-related activities like sending, receiving, organizing, deleting, filtering, searching, and managing spam emails. Due to these problems, blind people are facing difficulties not only in operating a smartphone but also in performing several email-related activities. Furthermore, spam and junk emails cause frustration and contribute to cognitive overload. We proposed TetraMail, a usable blind-friendly email client to overcome the challenges pertaining to the accessibility and usability of email-related activities on a smartphone. The proposed email client is evaluated through an empirical study of 38 blind participants by performing 14 email activities. The results of this prototype implementation show an improved user experience, accuracy in task completion, and better control over touchscreen interfaces in performing basic activities of managing emails. The results demonstrate that TetraMail is an accessibility-inclusive email client enabling blind people to have a better user interaction experience and minimal cognitive overload in managing emails.