Exploring hand gestures among visually impaired and sighted users over remote control devices

With the emerging of touch-less human-computer interaction techniques, mid-air hand gestures have been widely used to create communication between users and devices, taking into account the inclusive design approach. As the visual world grows on digitization, tremendous research is being conducted on disadvantaged users, especially visually impaired users. However, many of these studies do not focus on the inclusive design approach. This thesis has been written to define usability and accessibility of gestures with an inclusive design approach, taking into account the problems faced by visually impaired people. In-depth interviews were conducted with visually impaired and visually impaired users and their gesture preferences were compared. 9 action commands were given to 5 visually impaired and 5 visually impaired participants to interact on their own computers. Findings show that there is a wide variety of gestures participants prefer according to their interaction habits. This preference model shows that graphical user interface elements have an effect on gesture preferences for visually impaired users, and that physical environment such as touch also has an impact on the gesture preferences of visually impaired users. In addition, the research only investigates mid-air gestures and interviews were conducted remotely due to the COVID-19 outbreak.