Usability Aspects of Adaptive Mobile Interfaces for Colour-Blind and Vision Deficient Users

Colour-blindness or Colour Vision Deficiency (CVD) is not a disability rather it is naturally challenging vision problem in which user feel difficulty in distinguishing different colours especially differentiating among blue and yellow or red and green colours. It has broader impact as 8% (1 in 12) men and around 0.5% (1 in 200) women are facing this challenge. Today the devices are becoming smarter in recognizing user limitations and operating systems in Mobile-phones are providing such services which help user in their own context to overcome their barriers in usage of information and communication technologies. This paper explores the possibility to transform static interfaces into adaptive user interface which automatically change its behaviour according to user requirements. A research application has been developed which detects the colour-blindness types and automatically switch to respective colour mode. To simulate the visual abilities of user, the Ishihara test is performed in start. Two separate groups consisting 30 colour-blind users and another same sample of colour deficient users performed three different tasks in non adaptive and adaptive environment. The results indicated that adaptive environment enhanced user effectiveness in tasks completion up to 20% and increased their efficiency up to 8%. Moreover, the users improved their satisfaction level for adaptive environment, specially the substantial difference of satisfaction recorded 40.54% in Protanopia.