Daily Note: Enhancing Tactile Interaction on Touchscreen Devices

These notes are a summary of concepts presented in “Interactiles: 3D Printed Tactile Interfaces to Enhance Mobile Touchscreen Accessibility.”

Xiaoyi Zhang, Tracy Tran, Yuqian Sun, Ian Culhane, Shobhit Jain, James Fogarty, and Jennifer Mankoff. 2018. Interactiles: 3D Printed Tactile Interfaces to Enhance Mobile Touchscreen Accessibility. In Proceedings of the 20th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS ’18). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 131–142. https://doi.org/10.1145/3234695.323634

  1. Design Goals
    • Development of a low-cost, portable, unpowered system for tactile interaction on touchscreens
    • Combine 3D-printed hardware interfaces and software for mapping physical interactions to digital controls
    • Focus on enhancing accessibility while maintaining compatibility with existing applications
  2. Key Design Principles
    • Compatibility
      • Works with built-in screen readers without modifying existing apps
    • Tangible interaction
      • Hybrid hardware-software approach for intuitive navigation and interaction
    • Information accessibility
      • Addresses limitations of screen readers by enhancing tangibility and spatial awareness
  3. Core Functionalities
    • Element navigation
      • Improved access to menus and interface elements
    • Bookmarking
      • Quick reference points within applications
    • Page scrolling
      • Easier navigation through content
    • App switching
      • Seamless transitions between applications
    • Number entry
      • Simplified input for numerical data
  4. Interaction Mechanism
    • Transmitting capacitive touch
      • Reliable and comfortable user input via conductive hardware components
    • Accessibility APIs
      • Leverages existing OS frameworks for broad compatibility
    • Interaction proxies
      • Enhances app functionality by modifying input/output
        • Plating windows that overlay existing apps for custom output/input handling
        • Event listeners to intercept and reinterpret touch events before reaching apps
  5. Functional Components
    • Dynamic overlays
      • Adaptive physical interfaces to support various hardware components
    • Interaction service
      • Captures touch events, interprets them, and executes related actions
    • Navigation aids
      • Strategies for locating/relocating information with known mappings and navigation buttons
  6. Applications and Use Cases
    • Accessibility modifications
      • Enhances user interface accessibility by adding alternative text or navigation
    • App interaction
      • Optimizes tasks like app switching and number entry for users requiring tactile feedback