Write-it-Yourself with the Aid of Smartwatches: A Wizard-of-Oz Experiment with Blind People

Working with non-digital, standard printed materials has always been a challenge for blind people, especially writing. Blind people very often depend on others to fill out printed forms, write checks, sign receipts and documents. Extant assistive technologies for working with printed material have exclusively focused on reading, with little to no support for writing. Also, these technologies employ special-purpose hardware that are usually worn on fingers, making them unsuitable for writing. In this paper, we explore the idea of using off-the-shelf smartwatches (paired with smartphones) to assist blind people in both reading and writing paper forms including checks and receipts. Towards this, we performed a Wizard-of-Oz evaluation of different smartwatch-based interfaces that provide user-customized audio-haptic feedback in real-time, to guide blind users to different form fields, narrate the field labels, and help them write straight while filling out these fields. Finally, we report the findings of this study including the technical challenges and user expectations that can potentially inform the design of Write-it-Yourself aids based on smartwatches.