Making Printed Documents Accessible for People with Visual Impairments

Filling out printed forms (e.g., checks) independently is currently impossible for blind people, since they cannot pinpoint the locations of the form fields, and quite often, they cannot even figure out what fields (e.g., name) are present in the form. Hence, they always depend on sighted people to write on their behalf, and help them affix their signatures. Extant assistive technologies have exclusively focused on reading, with no support for writing. In this thesis, I present a first-of-its-kind accessible writing aid for blind people that leverages advances of computer vision and human-computer interaction. Firstly, this thesis presents WiYG, a Write-it-Yourself guide that works on a desk and directs a blind user to the different form fields, so that she can independently fill out form fields without seeking assistance from a sighted person. A user study with 13 blind participants showed that with WiYG, users could correctly fill out the form fields at the right locations. Secondly, I present the results of user studies investigating how blind users interact with wearable input technologies. Specifically, I report the insights from a Wizard-of-OZ study with wearable cameras as well as an exploratory study of mid-air wrist gestures. The results of these studies informs the design of the next generation of the writing assistants discussed later in this thesis. Thirdly, this thesis presents PaperPal, a wearable smartphone assistant which blind people can use to fill out paper forms independently. Unlike WiYG, PaperPal does not require the smartphone and the paper to be placed on a stationary desk, does not depend on the signature guide for form filling, and has audio read outs of the form's text content. PaperPal was evaluated with 8 blind users. Results indicate that they can fill out form fields at the correct locations with an accuracy reaching 96.7%.Finally, this thesis presents the PaperPal as a complete end-to-end system. To do so, we add a document photography tool that enables the blind users to take images of the documents independently. PaperPal automatically extracts form information from these images, and enables the users to interact with any form using the end-to-end PaperPal system independently. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]