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Exploring Low-Cost Materials to Make Pattern-Based Lock-Screens Accessible for Users with Visual Impairments or Deafblindness

Nowadays, the wide majority of Europeans uses smartphones. However, touch displays are still not accessible by everyone. Individuals with deafblindness, for example, often face difficulties in accessing vision-based touchscreens. Moreover, they typically have few financial resources which increases the need for customizable, low-cost assistive devices. In this work-in-progress, we present four prototypes made from low-cost, every-day materials, that make modern pattern lock mechanisms more accessible to individuals with vision impairments or even with deafblindness. Two out of four prototypes turned out to be functional tactile overlays for accessing digital 4-by-4 grids that are regularly used to encode dynamic dot patterns. In future work, we will conduct a user study investigating whether these two prototypes can make dot-based pattern lock mechanisms more accessible for individuals with visual impairments or deafblindness.