Why visually impaired people resist to adopt touchscreen smartphones in the Czech Republic?

Touchscreen smartphones are powerful devices capable considerably help people with special needs. Despite this, a large number of visually impaired people in the Czech Republic hesitate to adopt them. In this paper, we present results of a qualitative study (n × 6) and quantitative study (n × 25), which explore how visually impaired people use their current phones, why some of them hesitate to adopt touchscreen smartphones and what is a trend in adoption of these technologies in the near future. The results indicate that participants using modern touchscreen smartphone consider themselves more independent than before when they used older keypad smartphones. They also use more internet related and entertainment applications, along with a large number of different navigation applications. However, it appears that one of the biggest fears of keypad smartphone users is the low speed of writing. Finally, it seems that keypad smartphones will be obsolete in few years even within this user group.