Improving public transit usability for blind and deaf-blind people by connecting a braille display to a smartphone

We conducted interviews with blind and deaf-blind people to understand how they use the public transit system. In this paper, we discuss key challenges our participants faced and present a tool we developed to alleviate these challenges. We built this tool on MoBraille, a novel framework that enables a Braille display to benefit from many features in an Android phone without knowledge of proprietary, device-specific protocols. We conducted participatory design with a deaf-blind person and describe the lessons learned about designing an interface for a deaf-blind person. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.5.2 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: User Interfaces

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: ASSETS
• Authors: Shiri Azenkot, Emily Fortuna
• Keywords: ASSETS 2010, Deaf-blind, Deaf-blind Person, Emerging Technology, Public Transit