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Title: Typing Slowly but Screen-Free: Exploring Navigation over Entirely Auditory Keyboards
Accessible onscreen keyboards require people who are blind to keep out their phone at all times to search for visual affordances they cannot see. Is it possible to re-imagine text entry without a reference screen? To explore this question, we introduce screenless keyboards as aural flows (keyflows): rapid auditory streams of Text-To-Speech (TTS) characters controllable by hand gestures. In a study, 20 screen-reader users experienced keyflows to perform initial text entry. Typing took inordinately longer than current screen-based keyboards, but most participants preferred screen-free text entry to current methods, especially for short messages on-the-go. We model navigation strategies that participants enacted to aurally browse entirely auditory keyboards and discuss their limitation and benefits for daily access. Our work points to trade-offs in user performance and user experience for situations when blind users may trade typing speed with the benefit of being untethered from the screen.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1909845
NSF-PAR ID:
10276808
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
ASSETS '19: The 21st International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility
Page Range / eLocation ID:
427 to 439
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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