Visual to Non-visual Collaboration on a Dynamic Tactile Graphics Display

Use of a novel sensor to investigate the complicated boundary between biotribology and surface topology and their impact on tactile graphic perception

Tactile graphics play an essential role in knowledge transfer for blind people. The tactile exploration of these graphics is often challenging because of the cognitive load caused by physiological constraints and their complexity. The coupling of physical tactile graphics with electronic devices offers to support the tactile exploration by auditory feedback. Often, these systems have strict constraints regarding their mobility or the process of coupling both components. Additionally, visually impaired people cannot appropriately benefit from their residual vision. This article presents a concept for 3D printed tactile graphics, which offers to use audio-tactile graphics with usual smartphones or tablet-computers. By using capacitive markers, the coupling of the tactile graphics with the mobile device is simplified. These tactile graphics integrating these markers can be printed in one turn by off-the-shelf 3D printers without any post-processing and allows us to use multiple elevation levels for graphical elements. Based on the developed generic concept on visually augmented audio-tactile graphics, we presented a case study for maps. A prototypical implementation was tested by a user study with visually impaired people. All the participants were able to interact with the 3D printed tactile maps using a standard tablet computer. To study the effect of visual augmentation of graphical elements, we conducted another comprehensive user study. We tested multiple types of graphics and obtained evidence that visual augmentation may offer clear advantages for the exploration of tactile graphics. Even participants with a minor residual vision could solve the tasks with visual augmentation more quickly and accurately.

Blind people access visual information by touching tactile graphics. Many of the tactile graphics are produced by sighted people, but a few of blind people produce tactile graphics independently. A raised-writer is often use when blind people draw tactile graphics. When a blind person writes line-drawings on the cellophane sheet using the pen, the script swells so that the blind person can feel them. However, once a line has been drawn on a cellophane sheet, it cannot be erased and redrawn. Furthermore, any line-drawings of a raised-writer cannot be utilized as digital images. So, we have developed a tactile graphics editor which enables blind people edit line-drawings independently. In this paper, we introduce a tactile graphics editor which has been improved from our previous version; the editor enables blind users to produce tactile graphics interactively with LaTeX codes. We then show an experience of a blind physics teacher when he used our editor.

Zoom Maps are a recent design development from the Teaching Aides Department at Huseby Resource Centre for the Visually Impaired Oslo, Norway (see Figures 1 and 2). The aim of Zoom graphics is to produce better maps for individuals with visual impairments and to present a design methodology for the producers of tactile graphics. The first two pilot tests of a set of Zoom Maps have proved favorable (see the Pilot tests section). [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] Zoom Maps and Zoom graphics were designed specifically for braille readers who are not accustomed to reading tactile graphics. Zoom Maps can be thought of as introductory maps that a reader with visual impairment uses before he or she advances to more complicated maps. A series of Zoom Maps can be compared to those created by online map services. In an online map, a map of an area is presented from a distance and the user is able to closer and closer to see more and more details, both geographical and political. Instead of online screen images, however, Zoom Maps provide hardcopy tactile maps which each new close-up results a new, more detailed, page of a tactile graphic (see Figure 3). In Zoom Maps, the amount of graphic information is restricted to avoid clutter. If the graphics exceed a given amount, the original graphic is divided to create a new map with fewer graphics and more specific information. This division can result a series or hierarchy of maps that take a small section of a map and zoom in on it--hence the name, Zoom Maps. [FIGURE 2 OMITTED] MAP HIERARCHY The map hierarchy and number of maps that are needed are dependent on which geographic information will be presented. That is, if one wants to show towns all the counties of a region, then it is likely that more maps will be required than if only select towns of that region are to be shown. If there is a large amount of information a section of a map, the section needs to be divided into segments--such as Northwest, Northeast, Southeast, and Southwest--and then four new maps are created to show the detailed information for each new section (see Figure 3). [FIGURE 3 OMITTED] DESIGN The design of the maps is based on four main concepts or rules. The first rule is to use the structured reading methods of a braille reader, that is, to read a text page line for line. The second rule is to divide text from graphics by a defining rectangle. The third rule is to restrict the amount of symbolic graphic information that is allowed one tactile graphic. The fourth rule is to use texture to create contrast between the textures used to differentiate geographic areas. One result of these rules is that each new map will, for the reader, seem familiar to the ones from before and thereby establish consistency. Another result is that they give the designer clearer guidelines for creating certain tactile graphics. Structured reading A reader of braille first scans the page and then reads one line after another. Zoom Maps take this process into consideration by placing text used a map an orderly way, similar to a page of braille. Text is placed only at the sides of the defining rectangle. Division of text and graphics Graphics and text appear on the same page of a Zoom Map, but they are physically divided by a rectangle. The graphics of the map are encompassed by a rectangle, and the text of the map is on the outside of the rectangle. The text on the outside of the rectangle is adjacent to the specific part of the graphic that it relates to. If there is a great distance between the text and the graphic, a leading line (made up of the braille letter g), is used to connect the text to the graphic. The purpose of using the letter g is to differentiate clearly between a leading line and a line used the graphic. By doing so, the leading line is less likely to be confused with a graphic line and therefore does not add graphic clutter to the map. …

Tactile graphics are widely used to present maps and statistical diagrams to blind and low vision (BLV) people, with accessibility guidelines recommending their use for graphics where spatial relationships are important. Their use is expected to grow with the advent of commodity refreshable tactile displays. However, in stark contrast to visual information graphics, we lack a clear understanding of the benefts that well-designed tactile information graphics offer over text descriptions for BLV people. To address this gap, we introduce a framework considering the three components of encoding, perception and cognition to examine the known benefts for visual information graphics and explore their applicability to tactile information graphics. This work establishes a preliminary theoretical foundation for the tactile-frst design of information graphics and identifes future research avenues.

This article presents research on making schoolbook illustrations accessible for students with visual impairment. The MaskGen system was developed to interactively transpose illustrations of schoolbooks into tactile graphics. A methodology was designed to transpose the graphics and prepare them to be displayed on the STReSS, a refreshable tactile device. We experimented different associations of tactile rendering and audio feedbacks to find a model that children with visual impairment could use. We experimented with three scientific graphics (diagram, bar chart and map) with forty participants: twenty sighted adults, ten adults with visual impairment, and ten children with visual impairment. Results show that the participants with visual impairment liked the tactile graphics and could use them to explore illustrations and to answer questions about their content.

Graphic literacy is increasingly expected of all school leavers. This is particularly demanding on blind and visually impaired pupils who access graphically displayed information by touch. Through focus group discussions with 40 primary and secondary pupils in special schools, we sought to learn about their perspectives on the design and use of tactile graphics. The findings emphasise the challenges involved, not only for the users themselves, but also for their teachers and for specialist designers of tactile graphics.

Haptic technologies and applications have received enormous attention in the last decade. The incorporation of haptic modality into multimedia applications adds excitement and enjoyment to an application. It also adds a more natural feel to multimedia applications, that otherwise would be limited to vision and audition, by engaging as well the user's sense of touch, giving a more intrinsic feel essential for ambient intelligent applications. However, the improvement of an application's Quality of Experience (QoE) by the addition of haptic feedback is still not completely understood. The research presented in this paper focuses on the effect of haptic feedback and what it potentially adds to the experience of the user as opposed to the traditional visual and auditory feedback. In essence, it investigates certain issues regarding stylus-based haptic education applications and haptic-enhanced entertainment videos. To this end, we used two haptic applications: the haptic handwriting learning tool to experiment with force feedback haptic interaction and the tactile YouTube application for tactile haptic feedback. In both applications, our analysis shows that the addition of haptic feedback will increase the QoE in the absence of fatigue or discomfort for this category of applications. This implies that the incorporation of haptic modality (both force feedback as well as tactile feedback) has positively contributed to the overall QoE for the users.

Mobile devices are designed mostly to fit users with no particular disability. Tactile affordances are neglected at the expense of more attractive stylish interfaces and assistive solutions are stereotypical, also facing disabilities with a narrow perspective. A blind user is presented with screen reading software to overcome the inability to receive feedback from the device. However, these solutions go only half-way. In the absence of sight other capabilities stand up. Above all, the sense of touch plays an essential role while interacting with physical keypads. To empower these users, a deeper understanding of their capabilities and how they relate with technology is mandatory. We propose a user-product compatibility approach, taking in account that blind users have different tactile attributes. We expect to correlate the user's tactile sensitivity and keypad demands, enabling informed keypad design and selection.

Graphical information, such as illustrations, graphs, and diagrams, are an essential complement to text for conveying knowledge about the world. Although graphics can be communicated well via the visual modality, conveying this information via touch has proven to be challenging. The lack of easily comprehensible tactile graphics poses a problem for the blind. In this paper, we advance a hypothesis for the limited effectiveness of tactile graphics. The hypothesis contends that conventional graphics that rely upon embossings on two-dimensional surfaces do not allow the deployment of tactile exploratory procedures that are crucial for assessing global shape. Besides potentially accounting for some of the shortcomings of current approaches, this hypothesis also serves a prescriptive purpose by suggesting a different strategy for conveying graphical information via touch, one based on cutouts. We describe experiments demonstrating the greater effectiveness of this approach for conveying shape and identity information. These results hold the potential for creating more comprehensible tactile drawings for the visually impaired while also providing insights into shape estimation processes in the tactile modality.

Research work has been ongoing in the field of dynamic display of tactile graphics for about forty years now. Compared to these numerous efforts, the number of systems actually in use in daily life has remained quite low. Today, there are still very few workplaces for the blind that include a dynamic tactile graphic display for providing information in graphic form, besides speech and Braille output systems. One application which does utilize such devices today, however, are math classes in schools. The following paper introduces a system that permits blind students to both create and explore mathematical graphics without assistance

Maintaining and modifying pace through tactile and multimodal feedback

Through out the design process, designers have to consider the needs of potential users. This is particularly important, but rather harder, when the designers interact with the artefact to-be-designed using different senses or devices than the users, for example, when sighted designers are designing an artefact for use by blind users. In such cases, designers have to ensure that the methods used to engage users in the design process and to communicate design ideas are accessible. In this paper, we describe a participatory approach with blind users based on the use of a scenario and the use of dialogue-simulated interaction during the development of a search interface. We achieved user engagement in two ways: firstly, we involved a blind user with knowledge of assistive technologies in the design team and secondly, we used a scenario as the basis of a dialogue between the designers and blind users to simulate interaction with the proposed search interface. Through this approach, we were able to verify requirements for the proposed search interface and blind searchers were able to provide formative feedback, to critique design plans and to propose new design ideas based on their experience and expertise with assistive technologies. In this paper, we describe the proposed scenario-based approach and examine the types of feedback gathered from its evaluation with blind users. We also critically reflect on the benefits and limitations of the approach, and discuss practical considerations in its application.Keywordsscenarioparticipatory designvisually impaired users

Neurobiology of speaking and stuttering

Although a large amount of research has been conducted on building interfaces for the visually impaired that allows users to read web pages and generate and access information on computers, little development addresses two problems faced by the blind users. First, sighted users can rapidly browse and select information they find useful, and second, sighted users can make much useful information portable through the recent proliferation of personal digital assistants (PDAs). These possibilities are not currently available for blind users. This paper describes an interface that has been built on a standard PDA and allows its user to browse the information stored on it through a combination of screen touches coupled with auditory feedback. The system also supports the storage and management of personal information so that addresses, music, directions, and other supportive information can be readily created and then accessed anytime and anywhere by the PDA user. The paper describes the system along with the related design choices and design rationale. A user study is also reported.