UITalk

Quick Info

Project Date Feb. 1, 2019 - Oct. 28, 2019
PIs: Jennifer Mankoff (PI)
Sponsors: NSF
Keywords: accessibility, blind, low-vision, touchscreen accessibility, accessible interfaces, touch screens, blind users, assistive technology, accessible touchscreens, design

News

Venkatesh Presents UITalk Poster

Oct 29, 2019 | Jon

Venkatesh presents our poster on UITalk to ASSETS'19 attendees. UITalk introduces a new multi-modal and accessible approach for blind or low-vision designers to edit visual layouts of webpages while maintaining visual aesthetics

About

Overview of the multi-modal system

The multi-modal system includes three parts: an accessible canvas, a code editor, and a controller to check if edits from the accessible canvas and the code editor violate the design guidelines.

Screen reader descriptions of User Interfaces (UIs) allow Blind and Visually Impaired (BVI) users to navigate and understand functionality; however, they do not allow BVI designers to edit and comprehend visual attributes. In this poster paper, we discuss the design and preliminary exploration of a multi-modal and accessible approach for BVI designers to edit visual layouts of webpages while maintaining visual aesthetics. To explore our multi-modal approach, we created a three-part system: an accessible canvas that allows BVI developers to use touch and gestures to modify the visual properties of web UI elements, a code editor that supports direct code modifications, and a controller that processes proposed updates from either the canvas or code editor and then checks if the updates violate design guidelines.