The Blind Date: Improving the Accessibility of Mobile Dating Applications for Individuals with Visual Impairments Online dating platforms such as Tinder, Bumble, and Coffee Meets Bagel have become not only culturally accepted, but incredibly common methods of meeting new people. However, many of these online dating platforms user profiles rely heavily on visual data. This reliance creates a barrier to access for individuals with visual impairments. Using voiceover systems with any of these applications leads to a very confusing interaction that withholds a lot of the available data from users with visual impairments. We propose a method of providing users with visual impairments access to the data encoded in the images of other users profiles. To learn what information people are most interested in knowing about the person in the dating profile, we surveyed both individuals with and without visual impairments to learn what visual features are important in an individualu0027s dating profile. We then built a series of classifiers for the most popular features that were identified by the survey. Because the APIs for the dating applications mentioned above are not public, we created an application that works via screenshots. When the user would like to know more about a given profile, they just need to activate the native screenshot functionality on their phone, and our application will find the image in the screenshot folder on the phone, send it to our web service where the image is securely analyzed and output text is formed. This text is sent back to the phone and read out, providing the user with a coarse idea of what the image contained and helping them to make a more informed decision as to whether they are interested in the individual in the profile or not.

Evaluating Smartphone Screen Divisions for Designing BlindFriendly TouchBased Interfaces The blind people are facing numerous challenges in identifying, locating nonvisual items on touchscreen interfaces such as smartphones, tablets, etc. The occurrence of wrong touches and subsequently following an incorrect sequence of accessing objects and UI artifacts may mislead visually impaired people to perform common activities on smartphones. The need for designing usable interface for blind people to perform their common activities, such as placing a call, sending and receiving SMS and emails, etc., is already established. There are specific usability requirements that have to meet while developing usable interfaces for blind people. One of the most important aspects of usability requirements is the division of a touchscreen in such a way that should enable blind people to locate objects and nonvisual items on the screen easily and comfortably. This includes partitioning of touchscreen into two, three, four, five, eight, and nine partitions with respect to finger placement. The study aims to design usable user interfaces for blind people to perform common activities on smartphones. This paper reports on a datagathering study, which was conducted for finding the most usable design of different screen divisions. It also outlooks a usability analysis of the screen partitioning based on usability requirements including operational, orientation, the degree of understanding, consistency, semanticloss, navigational complexity, and time consumption in locating a particular object on a touchscreen. The novel contribution is a set of guidelines for designing easytouse semantically enriched user interface framework for blind people.