Accessibility on Mobile Device: Opportunities and Challenges

Mobile devices have been playing a critical role in people's modern lifestyle. They also have been helping individuals with impairments live a more independent life. Research communities and companies have built various assistive technologies so that mobile devices have alternative interaction models for users with visual, hearing, motor and other impairments. And those devices can aid users with real world tasks while users go about their daily routines. For example, screen readers and image recognition apps have been widely adopted by blind people to perform object identification tasks. When there is opportunity there is also challenge and risk, when developing assistive technology security and privacy are easily overlooked and dangerous. Take the same example that blind people take photographs to recognize objects; how do we help them ensure those photos sent to the recognition servers don't have sensitive personal information and those results spoken by the device don't announce users' personal information to the world? While usability being the core of accessibility services, security and privacy implications are receiving more attentions from the users and mainstream companies.