An Exploratory Study about Accessibility, Usability and User Experience with the Visually Impaired using Mobile Applications

Resumo

Accessibility, Usability and User eXperience (UX) are relevant software quality criteria. However, Visually Impaired People (VIP) still face barriers in their interaction with applications on mobile devices due to the lack of quality in the criteria mentioned above. Therefore, this paper aims to investigate Accessibility, Usability and UX problems encountered by VIP on applications using mobile devices. A total of three users participated in this study, consisting of one with mild vision loss, one with moderate visual impaired and one with severe visual impaired. The most frequent and serious problems encountered by VIPs in mobile applications are: (1) font size, many applications do not allow zooming; (2) applications that do not have pre-established colors or color blindness; and (3) some applications lack a virtual voice assistant to assist blind users. Besides, they point out the need to carry out a more in-depth investigation of the Accessibility, Usability and UX problems encountered by the VIPs to establish effective guidelines for the design of applications targeted at this audience. Therefore, we recommended that to meet most of the requirements of VIP, there must be a design that involves the concepts of Usability, Accessibility, and UX jointly.