Interactiles: 3D Printed Tactile Interfaces to Enhance Mobile Touchscreen Accessibility Xiaoyi Zhang1*, Tracy Tran1*, Yuqian Sun1, Ian Culhane2, Shobhit Jain1, James Fogarty1, Jennifer Mankoff1 Computer Science & Engineering1, Mechanical Engineering2 DUB Group | University of Washington {xiaoyiz, tracyt28, ys47, shobizz, jfogarty, jmankoff}@cs.uw.edu,
[email protected] ABSTRACT The absence of tactile cues such as keys and buttons makes touchscreens difficult to navigate for people with visual impairments. Increasing tactile feedback and tangible interaction on touchscreens can improve their accessibility. However, prior solutions have either required hardware customization or provided limited functionality with static overlays. Prior investigation of tactile solutions for large touchscreens also may not address the challenges on mobile devices. We therefore present Interactiles, a low-cost, portable, and unpowered system that enhances tactile interaction on Android touchscreen phones. Interactiles consists of 3D-printed hardware interfaces and software Figure 1. Interactiles allows people with visual that maps interaction with that hardware to manipulation of impairments to interact with mobile touchscreen phones a mobile app. The system is compatible with the built-in using physical attachments, including a number pad (left) screen reader without requiring modification of existing and a multi-purpose physical scrollbar (right). mobile apps. We describe the design and implementation of quality of a sighted user’s experience [4]. When a screen Interactiles, and we evaluate its improvement in task reader takes what is inherently a 2D spatial interface of performance and the user experience it enables with people menus, hierarchies, and other common graphical user who are blind or have low vision. interface elements and transforms it into a linear audio Author Keywords stream, information is inevitably lost to the user.