Exploring feasibility of wrist gestures for non-visual interactions with wearables

The emergence of wearable devices such as smartwatches is spurring new user interface designs and interaction modalities for these devices. One such new input modality for interacting with smartwatches is wrist gestures. Smartwatches are beginning to support a set of wrist gestures using which users can do a range of one-handed interactions with these devices. Wrist gestures are particularly appealing for people with vision impairments (PVIs) as touch-based interaction with smartwatch screens is quite challenging for them. However, the question of how accessible are wrist gestures for PVIs to interact with wearable devices, remains unexplored. To this end, we conducted a user study to explore this question. The study reveals the accessibility barriers of the current generation of wrist gestures and sheds insight on how to make them accessible for PVIs.