Accessible Button Arrangements of Touchscreen Interfaces for Visually Impaired Users

Regardless of the improvements of accessibility functions on touchscreen computers, they have some problems using touchscreen interfaces including smartphones and tablets. The reason includes the arrangements of accessible objects may differ in users' visual conditions because the manipulations under screen readers are different from those without screen readers, the characteristics of object arrangements on the touchscreen computers for the visually impaired remain unclear. In this paper, our objective is to clarify the accessible button arrangement features in smartphones for users with visual impairments. We studied these characteristics by evaluating reaction times and error rates in a memory experiment of a single button from some arranged buttons in a smartphone for visually impaired people under a screen reader condition. As a result, the performance of reaction time on a button selecting task with a single button increased as the number of buttons increased; buttons aligned more two-dimensional than one-dimensional allocations.