Efficiency or Quality of Experience: A Laboratory Study of Three Eyes- Free Touchscreen Menu Browsing User Interfaces for Mobile Phones

A growing number of individuals who are blind or visually impaired is using smartphones in their daily activities. The touchscreen is a standard component of smartphones. While benefitting people with low vision by enhancing control of the text style and color and the size of images and text, the touchscreen has the downside for visually impaired users in that physical buttons for input of command selection and text entry are replaced with the touchscreen’s soft buttons. To overcome this limitation, we are investigating eyes-free approaches to using the smartphone’s touchscreen for information browsing. In this article, we present a laboratory study of three eyes-free touchscreen user interfaces for browsing menu hierarchies. Our findings indicate that quality of experience and familiarity may be as important as the time efficiency of completing tasks.