Tourism for all: a mobile application to assist visually impaired users in enjoying tourist services

This paper presents a mobile application designed in collaboration with an association devoted to facilitating the enjoyment of tourist services by visually impaired people (including low vision and blind users). In the design process, we performed a questionnaire to collect requirements and feedback from users. The outcome (100 answers) drove the design of mockups, and then, of the final application. Moreover, to make the application more appealing, we implemented gamification mechanism (to motivate the user in contributing to the application) and recommendation strategies (to assist users in choosing the tourist services). Some preliminary tests showed that the application results compliance with the most used screen readers and that users appreciated the provided functions.