The Development of a Universal Design Tactile Graphics Production System BPLOT2 (original) (raw)
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INTERACTIVE TACTILE GRAPHICS FOR THE BLIND.
There are over two million children in India living with vision loss, and only 5% receive education. One of the largest reasons for this is unavailability of teachers with training in special education, or even basic knowledge of handling students with special needs. Education for blind children can be expensive. The expenses include printing Braille scripts, printing tactile graphics, costly technology, etc. The project aims at reducing the cost of education of blind children and making the application interactive with the help of audio interaction. The project will detect finger/touch based input, process the input as per the module selected and give audio output.
Tactile Graphic Tool for Portable Digital Pad
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2010
and technical, scientific on-line documents that involve mathematical and non-linear expressions pose a great challenge to 'print disabled' people (persons who are unable to read standard printed material due to blindness, visual disability, physical limitations, dyslexia, etc.). The challenge is much greater for them while making or drawing such representations. The objective of the research work was to mainly make assistive and adaptive devices barrier-free and inclusive so that picture based nonlinear contents become accessible for print disabled students. While learning diagrammatic concepts (graphs, statistical representations, and geometry constructions), vision-impaired students need to understand the intermediate stages of drawing or constructions. So, the assistive device needs to provide an avenue to explore by hand the intermediate stages. Similarly, while teaching vision-impaired students geometric and diagrammatic concepts, resource teachers or special educators need to display and demonstrate the intermediate stages. Hence the need is to design an assistive device that complies with universal design principles. The 'Tactile Graphic Tool' (TGT) designed and developed is costeffective, adaptive and serves as a tool for an inclusive education environment.
Tactile graphical display for the visually impaired information technology applications
2013
This paper presents an interactive tactile graphical display, for the visually impaired information technology access applications. The display consists of a matrix of dots. Each dot is an electro rheological micro actuator. The actuator design and development process is presented in this paper. Prototype size 124x4 dots was manufactured. An advanced software tools and embedded system based on voltage matrix manipulation has been developed, to provide the display near real time control. The experimental tests carried out into the developed prototype showed that each actuator of the matrix was able to provide a vertical movement of 0.7 mm and vertical holding force of 100 to 200 mN. The stroke and dynamic response tests showed the practicability of the developed tactile display, for the visually impaired information technology applications.
Tactile Graphics in Braille Textbooks : Practical Guidelines for Making Tactile Drawings
2005
Braille textbooks include not only Braille text but also tactile drawings. These text and drawings are edited and made based on original ordinary textbooks. Among these ones, tactile drawings are not understood tactually unless they are made with various ideas. In Japanese Braille textbooks, tactile drawings made by Braille dots has majority. So we aimed to investigate practical guidelines for making tactile drawings by dots in Braille textbooks. We mentioned these five points as follows, giving examples with tactile drawings based on pictures and charts in ordinary textbooks. 1) Textbooks have pictures and charts that are not necessarily important from a viewpoint of its content. We have to appropriately choose pictures and charts in textbooks to be made tactile drawings. Occasionally, we should substitute suitable text for pictures and charts. 2) In tactile drawings by Braille dots, lines, surfaces as well as dots are made by dots. So tactile graphics by Braille dots has some restrictions due to making tactile drawings by dots alone. 3) Tactile perceptions have some characteristics that are different form visual perception. We need to make tactile drawings, following some criterions on the distance between two components, number of components in some unit area and so on. 4) Textbooks include various pictures and charts. So we need appropriate guidelines according to these ones. But, before we do so, it is effective that we classify various pictures and charts from two viewpoints; whether exact form of these ones is important and which information has priority in these ones. 5) Detailed explanatory notes in Braille should be added to tactile drawings. This promotes understanding of tactile drawings.
Refreshable tactile graphics applied to schoolbook illustrations for students with visual impairment
Proceedings of the 10th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility - Assets '08, 2008
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 2 , 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 answer questions about their content.
The 24th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility
People who are blind rely on touch and hearing to understand the world around them, however it is extremely difcult to understand movement through these modes. The advent of refreshable tactile displays (RTDs) ofers the potential for blind people to access tactile animations for the very frst time. A survey of touch readers and vision accessibility experts revealed a high level of enthusiasm for tactile animations, particularly those relating to education, mapping and concept development. Based on these suggestions, a range of tactile animations were developed and four were presented to 12 touch readers. The RTD held advantages over traditional tactile graphics for conveying movement, depth and height, however there were trade-ofs in terms of resolution and textural properties. This work ofers a frst glimpse into how refreshable tactile displays can best be utilised to convey animated graphics for people who are blind.
A Generic Framework for Creating Customized Tactile User Interfaces
2017
The screen reader, the software which transforms the regular content of an application to audio and/or tactile output for visually disabled person have to be customized by a software developer for every single (version of an) application in order to have a sufficient result. Adapting screen reader to an application requires the capabilities of a software developer, is difficult and time-consuming. So far no solution is available to create an easy and customized screen reader for various applications. The necessity of a software developer to develop or adapt a screen reader especially for two-dimensional tactile braille displays is a barrier for blind users. For improving the inclusion of blind users a generic framework was developed to allow the customization of existing software for a tactile representation without any software engineering knowledge.
Modelling, Measurement and Control C
Through screen-reader and Braille display, trained blind persons can nowadays manage to access to a lot of activities using computers. However, graphical interfaces and content where the spatial dimension is essential for understanding, like charts, pictures or the majority of videogames, are remaining hardly accessible. The Tactos and Intertact.net technologies are aimed to overcome these limits by providing an efficient sensory supplementation technology enabling blind users to access the spatial dimension of content through touch. Following a participatory design approach, we have worked in cooperation with blind persons to develop a learning environment for touch access to digital content with Tactos. Adoption is important when it comes to develop technologies and we report here on the research we conduct for enabling an independent learning of our system by blind persons. From our perspective, this possibility is a cornerstone for the development of a users' community.
Automating tactile graphics translation
2005
Access to graphical images (bar charts, diagrams, line graphs, etc.) that are in a tactile form (representation through which content can be accessed by touch) is inadequate for students who are blind and take mathematics, science, and engineering courses. We describe our analysis of the current work practices of tactile graphics specialists who create tactile forms of graphical images. We propose automated means by which to improve the efficiency of current work practices. We describe the implementation of various components of this new automated process, which includes image classification, segmentation, simplification, and layout. We summarize our development of the tactile graphics assistant, which will enable tactile graphics specialists to be more efficient in creating tactile graphics both in batches and individually. We describe our unique team of researchers, practitioners, and student consultants who are blind, all of whom are needed to successfully develop this new way of translating tactile graphics.
IEEE Transactions on Haptics, 2015
This paper discusses issues of importance to designers of media for visually impaired users. The paper considers the influence of human factors on effectiveness of presentation as well as the strengths and weaknesses of tactile, vibrotactile, static pins, haptic, force feedback, and multimodal methods of rendering maps, graphs and models. The authors, all of whom are visually-impaired researchers in this domain, present findings from their own work and work of many others who have contributed to the current understanding of how to prepare and render images for both hardcopy and technology-mediated presentation of Braille and tangible graphics.