Pressing a Button You Cannot See: Evaluating Visual Designs to Assist Persons with Low Vision through Augmented Reality

Partial vision loss occurs in several medical conditions and affects persons of all ages. It compromises many daily activities, such as reading, cutting vegetables, or identifying and accurately pressing buttons, e.g., on ticket machines or ATMs. Touchscreen interfaces pose a particular challenge because they lack haptic feedback from interface elements and often require people with impaired vision to rely on others for help. We propose a smartglasses-based solution to utilize the user’s residual vision. Together with visually-impaired individuals, we designed assistive augmentations for touchscreen interfaces and evaluated their suitability to guide attention towards interface elements and to increase the accuracy of manual inputs. We show that augmentations improve interaction performance and decrease cognitive load, particularly for unfamiliar interface layouts.