Effect of UX Design Guideline on the information accessibility for the visually impaired in the mobile health apps

Abstract

WHO recommends that patient participation is a necessary to enhance patient-safety and patient participation is only possible when patient are knowledgeable by accessing health information. Active-participation bypatients cannot be expected without adequate amount of knowledge on their disease and disease management such as diagnosis, medication, and observation. A variety of health apps are being released as a way to increase patients' knowledge, and increase patient participation during whole disease management process. The problem is that these health mobile apps only target and considered non-disabled people. In other words, accessibility for the visually impaired to visual information is rarely considered in designing a health mobile app. To solve this problem, we propose UX Design Guidelines for visually impaired (UXDG). Also, we analyze 120 health apps released in 12 different countries and analyzed their compliance rate of UXDG.Finally, we develop a test app using UXDG, and test its accessibility using two group. Group A includes people who are visually impaired and have low vision, and Group B consists of people who have no problems in vision. Through this experiment, it is possible to understand how information quickly can be recognized when UXDG is applied. The results of this study show that the health app using UX Design Guideline not only improves the visual information accessibility of the visually impaired but also improves the information accessibility for the none-visually impaired.Therefore, we propose that UX Design Guideline should be utilized for everyperson, either visually impaired or not, as a way to improve the accessibility of the health related mobile appsto health related information.