Using USB HID Braille for Automated System Testing

BBB-Link: https://bbb.tu-dresden.de/b/mat-xin-oyh-xzn

Presentation Language: English

Today’s digital life mandates that users with disabilities can equally access digital resources, media, and devices. This pushes developers to include accessibility testing in the development process, which is often carried out using automated tools to save costs and increase efficiency. Such testing solutions already exist for web development as well as for OS-level testing. However, when an entire product, including the complete hardware and software stack, is developed in- house, as could be for example the case for secure communication devices, a different testing solution may be warranted. Such a solution would test not just hardware or software in isolation, but the complete product as an end-to-end system. This work presents the foundation for such a testing solution, evaluating whether a device under test is compatible and reasonably accessible using a braille display. To this end, we emulated an HID braille display gadget on an external device. Once connected to the device under test, it drives automated UI tests through the input and output capabilities of the braille display. Using this method, we were able to test an exemplary set of navigation, input, and output functions of the braille display, as well as to conduct basic input-to-output latency benchmarks. The implemented test cases represent proof-of-concept examples and were carried out on Windows 10 using NVDA and JAWS. We conclude that the presented approach is feasible for testing the end-to-end braille functionality of a device under test, though its level of automation and versatility could be further improved by extending the setup with additional input and / or output devices.