Android Launcher for Visually Impaired

  Sneha Mittal,  Swati Garg,  Kanika Mittal

Smartphone technology and mobile applications have become an indispensable part of our daily life. The sighted people can use such smartphones easily, but due to the inability to read information on the screens, blind people face tremendous difficulties in using smartphones. At present many blind assistive systems have been implemented, but there is no such kind of good system for blind people for using smartphones and tablets. There have been many efforts, but even now, it is not easy for blind people to independently use their smartphones. One major stumbling block is a lack of understanding about how they use touch screens. Many studies have been conducted to compare how blind people and sighted people use touch screen gestures. Moreover, blind people are dependent on other people to open the required applications on their smartphones. In this paper, we propose “VisionAid”- an android launcher intended to help people with visual challenges or blind people to access Android-based devices. This launcher uses TTS(Text-to-Speech) and talkback feature to provide services through voice. It allows the user to listen to music, to use a voice recorder, to send and receive SMS, to receive and make calls, to create and delete alarms, to create and delete contacts, to browse the web with google engine as a starting point. Simple gestures are used such as sliding up and down to browse the menus and sliding right to select an option.

Keywords- Android, Accessibility for Blind, Launcher, Visually Impaired Persons, Speech-To-Text, Text-To-Speech, Talkback, Smartphones, Integration of functionalities

Unique Identification Number - IJEDR1901066
Page Number(s) - 367-372
Pubished in - Volume 7 | Issue 1 | February 2019
DOI (Digital Object Identifier) -   
Publisher - IJEDR (ISSN - 2321-9939)

  Sneha Mittal,  Swati Garg,  Kanika Mittal,   "Android Launcher for Visually Impaired", International Journal of Engineering Development and Research (IJEDR), ISSN:2321-9939, Volume.7, Issue 1, pp.367-372, February 2019, Available at :http://www.ijedr.org/papers/IJEDR1901066.pdf