Designing an accessible clothing tag system for people with vision impairments

  • Authors:

  • Michele A. Williams;Kathryn Ringland;Amy Hurst

  • Affiliations:

  • UMBC, Baltimore, MD;University of California, Irvine, CA;UMBC, Baltimore, MD

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 15th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

Many clothing characteristics (from garment color to care instructions) are inaccessible to people with vision impairments. To address this problem, clothing information is gathered from sighted companions, and later recalled using low-tech solutions such as adding safety pins to clothes. Unfortunately, these low-tech solutions require precise memory (such as recalling a pin's meaning) and provide limited information. Using an iterative design approach, we prototyped several alternative technology solutions and tested them with five people with vision impairments. We are working towards an interface that provides detailed information in a streamlined interaction, focusing our future efforts on a wearable RFID tagging solution.