Perceptions of Blind Adults on Non-Visual Mobile Text Entry

Text input on mobile devices without physical keys can be challenging for people who are blind or low-vision. We interview 12 blind adults about their experiences with current mobile text input to provide insights into what sorts of interface improvements may be the most beneficial. We identify three primary themes that were experiences or opinions shared by participants: the poor accuracy of dictation, difficulty entering text in noisy environments, and difficulty correcting errors in entered text. We also discuss an experimental non-visual text input method with each participant to solicit opinions on the method and probe their willingness to learn a novel method. We find that the largest concern was the time required to learn a new technique. We find that the majority of our participants do not use word predictions while typing but instead find it faster to finish typing words manually. Finally, we distill five future directions for non-visual text input: improved dictation, less reliance on or improved audio feedback, improved error correction, reducing the barrier to entry for new methods, and more fluid non-visual word predictions.