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Purpose – This paper aims to investigate accessibility and usage of mobile smartphones by Arabic-speaking visually impaired people in Saudi Arabia. Design/methodology/approach – In total, 104 participants with visual impairments were interviewed about their use of mobile phones with the following questions: What is the most commonly used mobile phone? What is the popular domain for which they use mobile phones? What are their favorite applications? What accessibility challenges do they usually face while using mobile phones? How often do they use the Internet via mobile phones and what are the reasons behind that? Findings – This research is the first study with such magnitude to investigate smartphone usage by Arabic-speaking visually impaired people. The survey has revealed that Arabic-speaking visually impaired people utilize mobile phones in different ways and strategies. Getting assistance in performing daily tasks and navigating independently are two of the most common uses for mobile phones. Originality/value – Based on the findings, the authors are going to propose some guidelines to developers to improve smartphone accessibility, application design and Internet usage to improve accessibility for visually impaired people.

Purpose Millions of visually impaired people (VIP) in the world still face difficulties browsing the Web and accessing information. This paper aims to present a proxy service that takes advantage of the concept of context-aware to help contextualizing web pages for visually impaired users. Design/methodology/approach The VIP-aware proxy combines five components to utilize the user preferences, adapts the requested web page and reorganizes its content to best match the preferences set by the user. This new scenario will assist VIP in browsing the Web more effectively. Findings A preliminary evaluation of the system resulted in general user satisfaction. Practical implications The VIP-aware proxy will provide users with a clean, accessible web page, save them time when screen readers examine content related to their preferences and save them money when unnecessary content is not downloaded. Originality/value The VIP-aware proxy presented in this paper is the first of its kind targeting VIP.

According to World Health Organization (WHO), in June, 2012 there were 285 million Visually Impaired People (VIP) around the world. Unfortunately, many face difficulties when browsing and getting information from the Internet especially when using traditional methods. In our paper, we aim at taking advantage of context-aware computing to assist VIP with contextualized web pages. We propose an integrable proxy service to minimize VIP's browsing problems and make it more effective. This service can reorganize the requested Web page content according to the user's preferences, so screen readers would not read content that is not of interest to the user. The result of the proxy was evaluated using two approaches: (1) manual inspection and (2) user testing. In the first experiment, 64% of the 50 converted websites got satisfactory results. In the second experiment, five VIP have tested the output of our service and expressed their general satisfaction with it.

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