PersonalTouch: Improving Touchscreen Usability by Personalizing Accessibility Settings based on Individual User's Touchscreen Interaction

Modern touchscreen devices have recently introduced customizable touchscreen settings to improve accessibility for users with motor impairments. For example, iOS 10 introduced the following four Touch Accommodation settings: 1) Hold Duration, 2) Ignore Repeat, 3) Tap Assistance, and 4) Tap Assistance Gesture Delay. These four independent settings lead to a total of more than 1 million possible configurations, making it impractical to manually determine the optimal settings. We present PersonalTouch, which collects and analyzes touchscreen gestures performed by individual users, and recommends personalized, optimal touchscreen accessibility settings. Results from our user study show that PersonalTouch significantly improves touch input success rate for users with motor impairments (20.2%, N=12, p=.00054) and for users without motor impairments (1.28%, N=12, p=.032).