TY - GEN
T1 - DarkReader
T2 - 21st International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility, ASSETS 2019
AU - Xu, Jian
AU - Billah, Syed Masum
AU - Balasubramanian, Aruna
AU - Shilkrot, Roy
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank IV Ramakrishnan, Vikas Ashok, our study participants, and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful feed-backs. We also thank Lighthouse Guild at New York City to facilitate our studies. This research was supported by NSF CSR-1717973.
Publisher Copyright:
© Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM.
PY - 2019/10/24
Y1 - 2019/10/24
N2 - This paper presents a user study with 10 blind participants to understand their perception of power consumption in smartphones. We found that a widely used power saving mechanism for smartphones-pressing the power button to put the smartphone to sleep-has a serious usability issue for blind screen reader users. Among other fndings, our study also unearthed several usage patterns and misconceptions of blind users that contribute to excessive battery drainage. Informed by the frst user study, this paper proposes DarkReader, a screen reader developed in Android that bridges users' perception of power consumption to reality. DarkReader darkens the screen by truly turning it off, but allows users to interact with their smartphones. A second user study with 10 blind participants shows that participants perceived no difference in completion times in performing routine tasks using DarkReader and default screen reader. Yet DarkReader saves 24% to 52% power depending on tasks and screen brightness.
AB - This paper presents a user study with 10 blind participants to understand their perception of power consumption in smartphones. We found that a widely used power saving mechanism for smartphones-pressing the power button to put the smartphone to sleep-has a serious usability issue for blind screen reader users. Among other fndings, our study also unearthed several usage patterns and misconceptions of blind users that contribute to excessive battery drainage. Informed by the frst user study, this paper proposes DarkReader, a screen reader developed in Android that bridges users' perception of power consumption to reality. DarkReader darkens the screen by truly turning it off, but allows users to interact with their smartphones. A second user study with 10 blind participants shows that participants perceived no difference in completion times in performing routine tasks using DarkReader and default screen reader. Yet DarkReader saves 24% to 52% power depending on tasks and screen brightness.
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U2 - 10.1145/3308561.3353806
DO - 10.1145/3308561.3353806
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85074926866
T3 - ASSETS 2019 - 21st International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility
SP - 96
EP - 104
BT - ASSETS 2019 - 21st International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility
PB - Association for Computing Machinery, Inc
Y2 - 28 October 2019 through 30 October 2019
ER -