Stroke-Gesture Input for People with Motor Impairments

Coping, Hacking, and DIY: Reframing the Accessibility of Interactions with Television for People with Motor Impairments

“…An extensive literature exists on assistive technology for users with motor impairments and a variety of computing devices, from desktop PCs [30,31] to tabletops [61], mobile devices [49,60,63,105], and wearables [55][56][57]. This literature has reported user performance with a wide range of input modalities, from touch input [31,38,61] to gesture [13,85,91], voice [18,40,41], eye gaze [16,46,70,102,103], and brain-computer input [28,62]. To mention a few examples, Smart Touch [61] is an accurate template matching technique designed to improve the performance of users with upper body motor impairments when selecting targets on touchscreens; Programming by Voice [40] is an interface that enables users with motor impairments to operate programming environments by speaking the code instead of using the mouse and keyboard; and EyeWrite [46] is a technique designed for eye-based text entry using letter-like gestures [100].…”

“…Such prior developments have been possible by means of careful analysis and understanding of the accessibility problems encountered by people with motor impairments in the physical world; see Anthony et al [5], Kane et al [49], Naftali and Findlater [63], and Mott et al [60] for examples of studies unveiling accessibility issues, interaction challenges, coping strategies, and adaptations adopted by people with motor impairments to use input devices and user interfaces. Regarding input on mobile devices with touchscreens, Vatavu and Ungurean [91] released the largest dataset of stroke gestures collected from users with motor impairments, with which they reported results regarding user performance (e.g., production time) and system performance (e.g., gesture recognition accuracy).…”

“…Based on the observation that people with motor impairments rely on their smartphones to overcome other accessibility challenges in the physical world, the extensive research on making mobile devices more accessible [60,66,85,86,86,91], and research on second-screen television watching [15,21], we believe that designing accessible smartphone apps for interacting with television is a feasible alternative to conventional TV remote controls. Without being constrained by the form factor and button layouts of the TV remote control, more accessible designs can be implemented, such as large-area buttons, fewer buttons, and adaptive layouts to match users' motor abilities following the principles of ability-based design [101]; see the SUPPLE system [33] for a relevant example.…”

“…Despite such accessibility problems and the large body of work on assistive input for people with motor impairments for a variety of computing devices [30,41,55,61,63,91,105], accessibility challenges for television and smart TVs have been less studied. One reason may be the recent focus on input modalities designed to complement or replace the TV remote control, such as gesture and voice input incorporated by many TV manufacturers into their products [52, 79,80].…”

Accessibility of Interactive Television and Media Experiences: Users with Disabilities Have Been Little Voiced at IMX and TVX

“…Although being rare contributions overall, datasets have been released in other communities of HCI, such as data regarding gestures articulated by people with upperbody motor impairments on touchscreen mobile devices[39], or the VizWiz datasets (https://vizwiz.org) meant to foster development of computer vision algorithms for assistive technologies and people who are blind.…”