Designing for Tactile Braille Reading Methods on Smartphones

In this paper, three new methods were presented for tactile Braille reading on smart phones, including left and right sliding, sliding to the right, and sliding down. The three methods were designed based on vibrotactile feedback of mobile phone and the direction encoding of finger movements. A series of pilot studies were carried out to tune and optimize the tactile parameters. And then, twelve participants were invited to implement a formal user experiment, evaluating the usability of three methods. The experiment results show that the three methods can reach adequate speeds, in 3.62, 3.16 and 4.09 seconds for average every character. The accuracy of the gestures can reach 98.1%, 98.1% and 96.9% respectively. The method with sliding to the right gesture is the most efficient one and also the user's most satisfied one.