Exploring the use of speech input by blind people on mobile devices

Abstract

Much recent work has explored the challenge of nonvisual text entry on mobile devices. While researchers have attempted to solve this problem with gestures, we explore a different modality: speech. We conducted a survey with 169 blind and sighted participants to investigate how often, what for, and why blind people used speech for input on their mobile devices. We found that blind people used speech more often and input longer messages than sighted people. We then conducted a study with 8 blind people to observe how they used speech input on an iPod compared with the on-screen keyboard with VoiceOver. We found that speech was nearly 5 times as fast as the keyboard. While participants were mostly satisfied with speech input, editing recognition errors was frustrating. Participants spent an average of 80.3% of their time editing. Finally, we propose challenges for future work, including more efficient eyes-free editing and better error detection methods for reviewing text.