Research to Market Transition of Mobile Assistive Technologies for People with Visual Impairments

Mobile devices are accessible to people with visual impairments and hence they are convenient platforms to support assistive technologies. Indeed, in the last years many scientifc contributions proposed assistive applications for mobile devices. However, few of these solutions were eventually delivered to end-users, depriving people with disabilities of important assistive tools. The underlying problem is that a number of challenges need to be faced for transitioning assistive mobile applications from research to market. This contribution reports authors’ experience in the academic research and successive distribution of three mobile assistive applications for people with visual impairment. As a general message, we describe the relevant characteristics of the target population, analyze different models of transition from academic research to end-users distribution and show how the transitioning process has a positive impact on research.