Cognitive impact evaluation of multimodal interfaces for blind people: Towards a systematic review

Abstract

Visual disability has a major impact on people’s quality of life. Although there are many technologies to assist people who are blind, most of them do not necessarily guarantee the effectiveness of the intended use. Then, we have conducted a systematic literature review concerning the cognitive impact evaluation of multimodal interfaces for blind people. We report in this paper the preliminary results of the systematic literature review with the purpose of understanding how the cognitive impact is currently evaluated when using multimodal interfaces for blind people. Among twenty-five papers retrieved from the systematic review, we found a high diversity of experiments. Some of them do not present the data clearly and do not apply a statistical method to guarantee the results. Besides this, other points related to the experiments are analyzed. We conclude that there is a need to better plan and present data from experiments on technologies for cognition of blind people. Moreover, as the next step in this research, we will investigate these preliminary results with a qualitative analysis.