Gesture design for visually impaired people on mobile platforms: A systematic literature review

Abstract

Visually impaired people are part of everyday smartphone users. Most smartphone app developers follow the same design principles in designing mobile app's user interface. But in the case of designing for users with visually impaired, the user interface design is not always easy. Gesture engineering is required to improve the existing gestures in order to allow visually impaired people to utilize their smartphones better and easier. The amount of existing gestures design studies for visually impaired people is few and need to be further increased in order to ease visually impaired people to use smartphones. More solutions such as new gestures or forms of input modalities for smartphone applications needed to be provided to enhance the use of smartphone by visually impaired people. The objective of this paper is to comprehend better and closely review the current state of analysis concerning gesture design for visually impaired people on mobile platforms. A systematic literature review has been conducted as an approach to gather, examine and analyze knowledge from previous articles targeted on this analysis field which addresses a range of topics published online between 2010 and 2018. We used a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) method to collect and review studies by following a predefined review procedure that imposes a set of research questions used to generate keywords to be searched on digital databases. The resulting articles are filtered and chosen based on the inclusion and exclusion criteria of study. 22 studies had been identified presenting analysis concerning gesture design for visually impaired people reviewed through systematic review process that draw knowledge to answer an outlined set of research queries. Topics such as gesture design for visually impaired people, problems faced by them while using smartphone and eyes-free design solutions had been analyzed. From the analysis, the studies targeted on gesture design for visually impaired people are mostly highlighted and this successively caved a path for more analysis and future research. The review process concluded that despite of having numerous studies that provide solutions for gesture design for visually impaired people, it is still insufficient to solve the gesture design problems faced by them. This study shows the research gap that includes existing issues in current gesture design which promises a new area of research that can provide better solutions to provide a favorable experience of visually impaired people while using smartphones.