Analysing the Mental Model of Blind Users in Mobile Touch Screen Devices for Usability

Understanding the concept of mental models can help to make sense of usability problems in software design. Yet the software engineer and developer faces many difficulties in the proper understanding of the user behaviour during interaction with the system. This paper presents a mental model of born blind users for touch screen devices to aid developers in designing and building better applications for blind users. The work of Kurniawan was preferred as a basis to examine the mental model of blind users. A user case study was carried out to assess the subjective mental model of users in regards to application usability. Our research revealed that two stages, namely: listening and interaction are used to facilitate the development of the Kurniawan mental model. This paper also suggests eight usability features that can be added to facilitate the design phase of the system. As far as is known this is a novel suggestion.