M. Kurosu (Ed.): Human-Computer Interaction, Part III, HCII 2014, LNCS 8512, pp. 134–145, 2014. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014 Touchscreen Mobile Phones Virtual Keyboarding for People with Visual Disabilities Agebson Rocha Façanha 1 , Windson Viana 2 , Mauro Cavalcante Pequeno 2 , Márcia de Borba Campos 3 , and Jaime Sánchez 4 1 Instituto Federal de Educação, Ciência e Tecnologia do Ceará, Brasil agebson@ifce.edu.br 2 Universidade Federal do Ceará, Brasil {windson,mauro}@virtual.ufc.br 3 Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul, Brasil marcia.campos@pucrs.br 4 Universidad de Chile, Chile jsanchez@dcc.uchile.cl Abstract. This paper presents the design and initial evaluation of a Braille virtual keyboard which allows text input on touchscreen devices such as smartphones and tablets. The virtual keyboard, called LêBraille, is a metaphor of the Braille writing system that uses audio and vibration feedbacks to promote accessibility for people with visual disabilities. We integrated this keyboard into two mobile applications and implemented an initial usability evaluation with nine people with visual disabilities. The evaluation comprised activities in- cluding a comparison of text input in three types of keyboards (physical keyboard, alpha numeric virtual keyboard, and LêBraille). Initial results indicates that writing activities can be as fast as a virtual keyboard depending on the Braille expertise of the user and the degree of blindness, however, the writing pace with a virtual keyboard is lower than the writing pace with a physical keyboard. Keywords: Accessibility, Mobile Computing, and Braille. 1 Introduction Touchscreen interfaces on smartphones and tablets have brought a new interaction challenge for users with visual disabilities [9,11]. After all, these devices have a glas- sy surface with several visual elements accessed through capturing the movements and gestures on the screen. Also, these interfaces have fewer points of reference and low tactile feedback to guide the interaction. Third-party applications developed for these platforms are more demanding from a visual perspective; they are based on gesture navigation and possess an adaptive layout, which changes the interface according to the device position (i.e., device screen rotation). In addition, physical keyboards are replaced by virtual versions. These characteristics make the interaction with these devices more complex for people with visual disabilities and often require strong cognitive efforts from them, such as the memorization of the positions of