A Case Study on Mobile Applications for Visually Impaired Persons

With the outburst of smart-phones today, the market is exploding with various mobile applications. This paper proposes an application using which visually impaired people can type a note in Grade 1 Braille and save it in the external memory of their smart-phone. The application also shows intelligence by activating reminders and/or calling certain contacts based on the content in the notes. The past few years have witnessed an exponential growth in the computing capabilities and onboard sensing capabilities of mobile phones, making them an ideal candidate for building powerful and diverse applications. We believe that the mobile phone can help to concentrate on the main functions of all the various specialized assistive devices into one, by enabling the rapid and cheap development of simple and ubiquitous assistive applications. This paper describes the design and user-study based analysis of different mobile applications, each one of which helps visually impaired people to overcome an everyday accessibility barrier.