User-Centered Software Development for the Blind and Visually Impaired: Emerging Research and Opportunities

Human-computer interaction studies the users and their interaction with an interactive software system (ISS). However, these studies are designed for people without any type of disability, causing there to be few existing techniques or tools that focus on the characteristics of a specific user, thus causing accessibility and utility issues for neglected segments of the population. This reference source intends to remedy this lack of research by supporting an ISS focused on people with visual impairment. User-Centered Software Development for the Blind and Visually Impaired: Emerging Research and Opportunities is a collection of innovative research on techniques, applications, and methods for carrying out software projects in which the main users are people with visual impairments. While highlighting topics including mobile technology, assistive technologies, and human-computer interaction, this book is ideally designed for software developers, computer engineers, designers, academics, researchers, professionals, and educators interested in current research on usable and accessible technologies.

Teresita de Jesús Álvarez Robles is a prominent last year student of Inter-institutional Ph.D. in Computer Science held by the Universidad Veracruzana in Mexico. Her main research topic focuses on User-eXperience, Usability, HCI, Interactive Mobile Systems for blind users, in both Software Engineering and Augmented Reality (AR). She has extended her research across Mexican territory; enriching it with congress presentations and books chapters in Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica and Spain.

Francisco Álvarez Rodríguez is a Professor of Software Engineering. He holds a BA. in Informatics (1994) and an MA. (1997) from the Autonomous University of Aguascalientes and an EdD degree from the Education Institute of Tamaulipas, México and he is Ph.D. from the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He has published research papers in several international conferences in the topics of software engineering and e-learning process. His research interests are software engineering lifecycles for small and medium-sized enterprises and software engineering process for e-learning. He is currently president of the National Council for Accreditation of programs and Computing, A.C. (CONAIC).

Edgard Benítez-Guerrero is a Full-Time Professor at the Faculty of Statistics and Informatics at the Universidad Veracruzana in Mexico. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the Université Joseph Fourier (Grenoble-I) in France, a Diplôme d'Etudes Approfondies en Informatique: Systèmes et Communications from the same university, and a M. Sc. in Artificial Intelligence from the Universidad Veracruzana, Mexico. His research interests focus on Ambient Intelligence, Human-Computer Interaction, Databases and CSCW with applications to Education and Decision Making.