C. Stephanidis (Ed.): Universal Access in HCI, Part IV, HCII 2011, LNCS 6768, pp. 335–344, 2011. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011 Pregnancy Test for the Vision-Impaired Users Tereza Hyková, Adam J. Sporka, Jan Vystrčil, Martin Klíma, and Pavel Slavík Department of Computer Graphics and Interaction Czech Technical University in Prague, Faculty of Electrical Engineering Karlovo nám. 13, 12135 Praha 2, Czech Republic {hykovter,sporkaa,vystrjan,xklima,slavik}@fel.cvut.cz Abstract. The vision-impaired people manage to cover most of their everyday needs with the help of technological equipment. Some needs, however, still require special attention: For example, commonly used pregnancy tests provide results that may be interpreted only visually. The users of these tests who are vision-impaired are dependent on a help of a sighted person which is a drastic invasion of users’ privacy. This paper proposes a solution to this problem: A design of a prototype of a system allowing the vision-impaired users to interpret the results of a pregnancy test using a PC with scanner is presented and evaluated. 1 Introduction A partial or total loss of sight severely limits the amount of information that a vision- impaired person may receive through a visual modality. This has a significant impact on a number of everyday activities, including reading printed text, navigation in the environment, or using medication. This paper presents a project whose aim is to enable visually impaired women interpret the result of a pregnancy test in privacy, without any (direct) help of other people. A prototype of a system has been developed and subjected to a usability study. Our solution is based on the machine-performed interpretation of the visible patterns produced by commonly available pregnancy tests. The suggested solutions were either the use of a scanner and a desktop application, or the use of a camera integrated in a mobile phone. We examined the advantages and disadvantages of both solutions. The article begins with a short description of the background, followed by the report of the user research we performed. Then we describe the creation of the first prototype as well as its testing with the target group. 2 Background Current state of the assistive technology allows the vision-impaired users access information by means of modality conversion [3]. Information presented in textual form is accessible by screen reader software with output via text-to-speech synthesis or on a Braille line. However, a number of activities remain in which the vision-impaired