  Despite their growing popularity, many public kiosks with touchscreens are
inaccessible to blind people. Toucha11y is a working prototype that allows
blind users to use existing inaccessible touchscreen kiosks independently and
with little effort. Toucha11y consists of a mechanical bot that can be
instrumented to an arbitrary touchscreen kiosk by a blind user and a companion
app on their smartphone. The bot, once attached to a touchscreen, will
recognize its content, retrieve the corresponding information from a database,
and render it on the user's smartphone. As a result, a blind person can use the
smartphone's built-in accessibility features to access content and make
selections. The mechanical bot will detect and activate the corresponding
touchscreen interface. We present the system design of Toucha11y along with a
series of technical evaluations. Through a user study, we found out that
Toucha11y could help blind users operate inaccessible touchscreen devices.
