Usability Evaluation of Blind and Visually Impaired Interface in Solving the Accessibility Problems

Abstract

The study is identified accessibility problems to reduce the cognitive effort and load of blind and visually impaired (BVI) people while using mobile application. It is evaluated the accessibility in smartphones to solve organization, presentation, and behavioral (OPB) problems. Evaluation of usability on newly developed application (Read Master) is validated with a special focus on blinds and visually impaired users. Fifty-six BVI users were included for accessibility testing. Four tasks were allocated to BVI users on a new developed mobile application. task completion within a specific time, Ethnography, and system usability scale (SUS) techniques were used for post-task evaluation. The results presented that organization of the application has maximum effectiveness for both blinds and visually impaired whereas the efficiency of visually impaired users is better than blinds. However, presentation of application owns the maximum satisfaction level for blinds that was noted as 87.62 score points, and for visually impaired people 89.21 score points were recorded for both organization and presentation of the application. Overall, this study showed greater usability for OPB problems of smartphone application with increased satisfaction level and improved effectiveness and efficiency for BVI users.