Current infrastructure design, discouragement by parents, and lack of internal motivation act as barriers for people with visual impairments (PVIs) to perform physical activities at par with sighted individuals. This has triggered accessible exercise technologies to be an emerging area of research. However, most current solutions have either safety concerns and/or are expensive, hence limiting their mass adoption. In our work, we propose VStroll, a smartphone app to promote walking among PVIs, by enabling them to virtually explore real-world locations, while physically walking in the safety and comfort of their homes. Walking is a cheap, accessible, and a common physical activity for people with blindness. VStroll has several added features, such as places-of-interest (POI) announcement using spatial audio and voice input for route selection at every intersection, which helps the user to gain spatial awareness while walking. To understand the usability of VStroll, 16 participants used our app for five days, followed by a semi-structured interview. Overall, our participants took 253 trips, walked for 50.8 hours covering 121.6 kms. We uncovered novel insights, such as discovering new POIs and fitness-related updates acted as key motivators, route selection boosted their confidence in navigation, and spatial audio resulted in an immersive experience. We conclude the paper with key lessons learned to promote accessible exercise technologies.

Most children who are blind live in low-resource settings and attend schools that have poor technical infrastructure, overburdened teachers, and outdated curriculum. Our work explores the role digital games can play to develop digital skills of such children in the early grades. Recognizing the critical role of teachers in introducing children to technology, we conducted a mixed-methods study to examine which attributes of digital games teachers find useful for children and what challenges they perceive in integrating digital games in schools for the blind. Our findings indicate that teachers prefer games that align well with curriculum objectives, promote learning, improve soft skills, and increase engagement with computers. Despite being overburdened and lacking technological support, teachers expressed strong enthusiasm to integrate these games in school curriculum and schedule. We conclude by discussing design implications for designers of accessible games in low-resource settings.

People with vision impairments access smartphones with the help of screen reader apps such as TalkBack for Android and VoiceOver for iPhone. Prior research has mostly focused on understanding touchscreen phone adoption and typing performance of novice blind users by logging their real-world smartphone usage. Understanding smartphone usage pattern and practices of expert users can help in developing tools and tutorials for transitioning novice and intermediate users to expert users. In this work, we logged smartphone usage data of eight expert Android smartphone users with visual impairments for four weeks, and then interviewed them. This paper presents a detailed analysis that uncovered novel usage patterns, such as extensive usage of directional gestures, reliance on voice and external keyboard for text input, and repurposed explore by touch for single-tap. We conclude with design recommendations to inform the future of mobile accessibility, including hardware guidelines and rethinking accessible software design.