solution for visually impaired persons

A lot of research has been done in order to protect the rights of the visually impaired people. The health and social care information centre defines the state of blindness as a state where in the individual is unable to any such work where in eyesight is essential 

The use of mobile devices for human computer interaction has increased manifolds with the advancement in technology. Be it recording symptoms of a patient by a cardiologist using a PDA, or be it a student of a university going through an M-Learning education module. With such a wide variety of applications, the problems of visually impaired people are increasing. As per a survey conducted by Royal National Institute of Blind People, there are 370,000 registered people in UK with full or partial visual impairment (Royal National Institute of Blind People). With such a large population of visually impaired people, Government is also made to do its bit to prevent any sort of discomfort to such population. The rights of disabled people are covered by legislation in the UK through the Disability Discrimination Act of 1995 which states that the disabled people should have important rights of access to everyday services. Service providers have an obligation to make reasonable adjustments to premises or to the way they provide a service” (DirectGov, 2010). With such a directive from Government, any service provider making the use of mobile communication device imperative for the people accessing its service has to make the adjustments accordingly so as to make such a service available to the impaired people.

Many mobile communication devices rely on the use of touch screen technology as an input method for these devices. With touch screen technology being exploited a lot, it has become increasingly difficult for blind to use the more advanced interaction devices. Concerns are being expressed on the fact that this touch screen revolution can alienate the visually impaired people (Reuters 2009). A study conducted by Nielsen Norman group establishes that a person having a good eye sight can operate touch screen devices three times as easily as a visually impaired person (Coyne & Nielsen 2001). Many researchers have done a lot of work to tackle with the problems faced by visually impaired people while using touch screen devices. Vanderheiden (1996) has done some breakthrough work in this field. He proposes a system wherein the visually impaired people would navigate on the screen and they would be notified of the various menu options being highlighted by either a voice or special kind of alerts. The users can then select the highlighted option by pressing a button that would be outside the screen area.