EYESZachary Lai

Research Questions that informed the design and development of this app

What kind of difficulty are blind people facing everyday?

■ People with complete blindness or low vision often have a difficult time self-navigating outside well-known environments (Beck, 2010). Many people with low vision will bring a sighted friend or family member to help navigate unknown environments.

■ Blindness causes considerable social challenges, usually in relation to the activities in which a blind person cannot participate. All too frequently, blindness affects a person's ability to perform many job duties, which severely limits her employment opportunities (Beck, 2010).

■ Blindness may also cause difficulties with participating in activities outside of a workplace, such as sports and academics (Beck, 2010). Many of these social challenges limit a blind person's ability to meet people and this may cause low self esteem.

Purpose of the Eyes app

■ * The main purpose of my app is to help people suffering from blindness or visual impairment getting through everyday life with the help from real people around the world. Because blind people are facing a lot of problems in life due to their disability, including navigating through an environment, checking details of a specific object etc.

How does the Eyes app work?

■ * The blind-user is able to post an image or text in the social stream, and a sighted-user is able to reply to the post to help the blind user. E.g. The blind-user doesn’t know the expiry date of a pack of snack food, so the blind-user posts the image of the snack and then the sighted-users are able to reply and help.

How do blind users use the app?

■ * In order for the blind-user to use the touch screen app, the blind-user will have to turn on the TalkBack accessibility function which is a setting that can be turned on in the setting app; this will be informed to the user when the user opens the app every time. When this function is turned on, the phone will play the text that the user is touching so the user will know what is on the screen and choose what to do.

Design Specifications■ I am going to design the app on Android system. Because in my research, it shows that

mobile phones are playing an important role in people’s everyday lives. It is easy to use and offers better communication to the world.

■ The platform that I am going to use to build my app is MIT App Inventor 2

■ The app that I am going to design will be a multi-screen tab bar app, which users are able to choose to be a sighted person or a blind person that needs help. There will also be multiple features that the user can choose.

■ The app will be free to download from google play store.

■ The biggest difficulty that I am facing in the process of completing the app is using a web database, which will store and retrieve all the user information and the posts and reply of the users.

■ The main background color of the app will be light blue, because it looks nice and friendly to users.

■ The target audience of the app are people who are blind or visually impaired, as well as people who are willing to help these users.

■ If there is abusive usage in the app, users are able to report and block the user.

App Design sketches: login screen

■ The login screen will include an animated eye logo. On this screen, users will be able to switch between the login function and sign up function. The background color of this page will be light blue. When the user completes the sign in process, a new username will be added to the web database. When a user logs in, the phone will be able to retrieve and upload data from the database.

App Design sketches: main screen■ A consistent tool bar will be located at the top of the app.

Three items will be on the tool bar. Each is represented by words, because it will clearly show the function of each item.

■ In the “Request” section, users will be able to browse through the questions that they asked. Instead of scrolling down the app. In this design, user are able to simply click on left and right button to see all the requests. When the blind users is using the app, they don’t have to worry about the scrolling, because they may scroll too much, and lose track of the exact post they want to find. In this design, they can simply click on the left and right button to keep track of the information they want to find.

Digital version of design

■ Login and main screens

■ Simple design that is visually appealing but also works well with the Talkback Accessibility function

More screens added to the App Design

■ Further screens designed throughout the iterative design/development stages

■ New Post screen

■ User Profile screen

Limitations of the Eyes app & points for improving this app

1. The app requires an insert image function. Currently, the user is only able to post text online. However, an image function would help both blind user and sighted user. The sighted user would know the problem better so they could provide better advice to the blind user. I was unable to figure out the method to allow the app to access the photo gallery on the phone, furthermore, I was unable to create a variable to store the image in and upload this image to the web database.

Limitation points to improve app cont.

2. Currently, the displayed user post is just a few lines of text, the browsing user are unable to see which user posted the content. It would be useful if the username of the user that posted the post is displayed. Moreover, if the browsing user can click on the username of the user to know more about this user, they could be having better connections on and off line. The sighted user can help the blind user easier.

3. The online world is dangerous, there could be users who seek to use this app abusively, so it would make the app safer if a report function is added. Users are able to report the abusive usage of the user and the app will ban the user in the app. This will make the whole online environment of the app healthier and safer, keeping the abusive user out, to protect both the blind user and the sighted user.

Limitation points to improve app cont.

4. A major problem of the app currently is that there is no reply function. I let the app retrieve the data from the web database as soon as the screen initializes, when the user wants to reply, the replied information has to be uploaded to the web database and then be retrieved to be able to display on the screen. But I can’t retrieve the data because there is already a “get value from database” handler being set to retrieve the user post information. This will require that I take more time to learn how to program this functionality in MIT App Inventor.

Limitation points to improve app cont.5. The list that stores all the usernames and password resets every time I reopen the

screen. When the screen initializes, the app creates an empty list, so if there are previously stored data, the data will be replaced by the list, but if I don't create the list, the data will not exist at all. The same problem applies to the web database part, when the user types in data, the new data will be stored to the web database with the same tag, so the data will replace the previously stored data in the web database. There are also problems relating to my current method. When the reader enters the log in information, the app will check if the reader’s username exists in the usernames list, then check if the user’s password exists in the password list, this is not a perfect method, because there may be some users using the same password, when another person wants to log in, even if the password he enters is not the user’s password, if there is a same password that exists, the app will still allow the user to log in. I should put the username and password together rather than separating them and check the combination.