An Assistive Technology-based Approach towards Helping Visually Impaired People

The most important point to consider before considering any solution or tool for blind people is to analyze what they need. This paper describes an approach to develop a smartphone-based solution for the varied problems faced by individuals with vision disabilities. The proposed approach is based on the assumption that smartphones are highly accessible and Developers simply ignore to create solutions to help the blind users with the problems they face in using the capabilities of the smartphone. The proposed approach is a user interface that provides an abstraction layer on the top of the Operating System (OS) and it contains various functionalities to make it work seamlessly for a blind user. It includes the use of gestures, text to speech, and voice APIs provided by the OS SDK to develop a UI that eliminates the inherent need to look into the smartphone display to perform essential functions. The user interface provides a simple sequence of gestures to perform actions and in turn, provides voice feedback and response to the user. The application supports all the basic functionalities like Calls, Texts, Music, Internet, Alarm, etc. The application also enables users to adjust the app settings viz. the speed and pitch of the voice feedback. The basic gestures include swiping right for entering into a menu, swiping left for an existing menu, and swiping upward or downwards for moving through the options in the menu. Using these only gestures users can perform any action on the smartphone. The User doesn't even need to tap the app icon to open the application every time as once configured it acts as a standalone interface for using the phone and performs necessary functions. The proposed interface also supports voice-based input in addition to the gestures. User can perform the necessary actions just by giving voice commands, possibly in their native languages, like a personal assistant, making it more usable and efficient. The complete user interface is developed by keeping in mind the capabilities and limitations of outwardly disabled people. The fundamental design goal of the App is to provide the blind user with an additional tool in the form of their smartphones to perform their tasks, keeping simplicity and minimalism in mind.