Examining the usability of touchscreen gestures for adults with DS

This document is part of a global investigation that aims to establish best practices in usability testing of mobile applications, that fit the specific needs of persons with cognitive disabilities. The motivating factor is to improve the quality of life
of people with special needs. As a first step, we want to discover what are the skills of people with DS (DS) when using a
mobile device. Thanks to its direct manipulation interaction style, multi-touch technology is the ideal mechanism for learning activities with a view to the social inclusion of people with DS. This paper investigates the most common touchscreen
gestures on commercial existing software. A commercial analysis was carried out to discover the touch screen gestures
used by 103 free software Apps running on a mobile touch screen tablet of 11 where the applications run”. The commercial
analysis showed that most applications support tap and drag operations on multi-touch technology. Additionally, the research
sought to discover the adults with DS (19–54 years of age) ability to perform other gestures on multi-touch surfaces. A DS
user skill study was performed to assess the ability of this user segment to interact with multi-touch surfaces. ... mehrThe analysis
involved 53 participants, aged between 19 and 54 years, from two vocational training centers attended by people with DS
in Madrid. Authors used the Gesture Games App for experimenting with multi-touch gestures such as tap, double tap, long
press, drag, scale up, scale down, and one-finger rotation. Tap, double tap, and drag were the three gestures that the most
participant could use. In contrast, participants had difficulty performing one-finger rotation and long press gesture. Our
statistical analysis showed that the ability to perform each gesture was independent of gender, age group, and previous
experience with touchscreen of a participant.