Providing blind people with access to technical diagrams (original) (raw)
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Automated interpretation and accessible presentation of technical diagrams for blind people
New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia, 2004
The EU-supported TeDUB (Technical Drawings Understanding for the Blind) project is developing a software system that aims to make technical diagrams accessible to blind and visually impaired people. It consists of two separate modules: one that analyses drawings either semi-automatically or automatically, and one that presents the results of this analysis to blind people and allows them to interact with it. The system is capable of analysing and presenting diagrams from a number of formally defined domains. A diagram enters the system as one of two types: first, diagrams contained in bitmap images, which do not explicitly contain the semantic structure of their content and thus have to be interpreted by the system, and second, diagrams obtained in a semantically enriched format that already yields this structure. The TeDUB system provides blind users with an interface to navigate and annotate these diagrams using a number of input and output devices. Extensive user evaluations have been carried out and an overall positive response from the participants has shown the effectiveness of the approach.
Drawing for Blind Learners: Assistive Technology for Graphical Design
2016 IEEE 16th International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT), 2016
One of the main problems faced by blind learners is a lack of drawing technologies that support images and diagram drawing without the help of a sighted support worker. Even though some technologies have been experimented with in the past, blind learners have not been keen on tactile drawing due to: the difficulty of the drawing task, the length of time taken to complete a simple task, and the inefficiency of the drawing experience. This paper presents a set of grammar tools that can be used by blind people to find spatial orientation, as well as knowledge and representation of the interactive drawing environment, to improve the understanding of a concept or a subject matter. The grammar can be adopted and personalised in education and learning when presenting technical diagrams. The grammar enables users to present graphics by mapping the cognitive visualisation of blind people into spatial information on a computer screen. This technique promotes an interactive and easy drawing environment to build objects, associations, and layout information by zooming, navigation, and grouping. It will lead to future possibilities such as 3D world modelling, printing, and multisensory integration of inputs and output methods.
2020 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE)
This Research Full Paper presents the design and evaluation of an auditory interface that allows blind people to perceive workspace awareness elements in a shared environment for modeling diagrams. Approximately 36 million Brazilians are visually impaired, where half a million are blind, and the enrollment of the blind at Brazilian higher public education institutions has been increasing. However, accessible tools for diagram authoring are scarce, despite their necessity on STEM courses. There are studies and new developments regarding the perception and authoring of diagrammatic information, but they do not consider collaborative features. Therefore, this study proposes the sonification of workspace awareness elements as a solution to enable accessible groupware features for the blind. It was designed auditory cues for three awareness categories (who, what, and where) using abstract sounds and favoring suitable metaphors for an intuitive mapping. The designed auditory cues were implemented in a prototype application for collaborative diagram modeling and evaluated through an objective usability test. The results demonstrated that participants could reasonably distinguish who made what and where. Besides, it was possible to identify the awareness categories which need more work.
Towards Automatic Diagram Description for the Blind
2017
Conventional methods for describing complex diagrams to blind people are either ineffective or inefficient. We describe our preliminary work on how one can describe a diagram to a blind person with minimal supervision. We explain our text localization method which beats commercially available off-the-shelf state-of-the-art systems. We also provide a prototype user interface which can effectively describe diagrams based on our user study.
Blind User Visualization and Interaction in Touch Screen: A Designer Perspective
Abstract — In this paper, we describe how blind students views external system using an image map as a case study. We proposed two interaction techniques which allow blind students to discover different parts of the system by interacting with a touch screen interface. An evaluation of our techniques reveals that 1) building an internal visualization, interaction technique and metadata of the external structure plays a vital role 2) blind students prefer the system to be designed based upon their behavioural model to easily access and build the visualization on their own and 3) to be an exact replica of visualization, the metadata of the internal visualization is to be provided either through audio cue or domain expert (educator). Participants who used touch screen are novice users, but they have enough experience on desktop computers using screen readers. The implications of this study to answer the research questions are discussed. Keywords- Blind; Visualization; Touch Screen; Accessibility; Usability; Image Map. https://sites.google.com/site/ijcsis/
Exploring User Interface Improvements for Software Developers who are Blind
The Journal of Science Education for Students with Disabilities, 2020
Software developers who are blind and interact with the computer non-visually face unique challenges with information retrieval. We explore the use of speech and Braille combined with software to provide an improved interface to aid with challenges associated with information retrieval. We motivate our design on common tasks performed by students in a software development course using a Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipeline Stages (MIPS) architecture simulation tool. We test our interface via a single-subject longitudinal study, and we measure and show improvement in both the user’s performance and the user experience.
Sensors
Access to graphical information plays a very significant role in today’s world. Access to this information can be particularly limiting for individuals who are blind or visually impaired (BVIs). In this work, we present the design of a low-cost, mobile tactile display that also provides robotic assistance/guidance using haptic virtual fixtures in a shared control paradigm to aid in tactile diagram exploration. This work is part of a larger project intended to improve the ability of BVI users to explore tactile graphics on refreshable displays (particularly exploration time and cognitive load) through the use of robotic assistance/guidance. The particular focus of this paper is to share information related to the design and development of an affordable and compact device that may serve as a solution towards this overall goal. The proposed system uses a small omni-wheeled robot base to allow for smooth and unlimited movements in the 2D plane. Sufficient position and orientation accura...
Including blind people in computing through access to graphs
Proceedings of the 16th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers & accessibility - ASSETS '14, 2014
Our goal in creating the Graph SKetching tool, GSK, was to provide blind screen reader users with a means to create and access graphs as node-link diagrams and share them with sighted people in real-time. Through this effort, we hoped to better include blind people in computing and other STEM disciplines in which graphs are important. GSK proved very effective for one blind computer science student in courses that involved graphs and graph structures such as automata, decision trees, and resource-allocation diagrams. In order to determine how well GSK works for other blind people, we carried out a user study with ten blind participants. We report on the results of the user study, which demonstrates the efficacy of GSK for the examination, navigation, and creation of graphs by blind users. Based on the study results, we improved the efficiency of GSK for blind users. We plan more enhancements to help meet the need for accessible graph tools as articulated by the blind community.
Blind Pad: Helping Visually Impaired People Perceive Graphical Information
Technology is advancing at a rapid rate, but blind and visually impaired people are at risk of being left behind due to the rapid digitization of information. The Blind Pad is therefore intended to bridge this gap and help these people perceive digital and graphical information. The Blind Pad project started in 2018 as an inter-departmental project across the University of Bath (UOB), which includes the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering (EEE). The EEE department coordinates with other departments, such as the Psychology department, to ensure that the Blind Pad offers a holistic benefit to its user. My role throughout this project was to improve on the first prototype of the Blind Pad by investigating methods to increase its tactile pixel resolution, making the Blind Pad more portable, and through other improvements. The Blind Pad should eventually lead to an improvement in social inclusion and employment prospects for its user. Through simulation using ANSYS and practical testing, this project showed that multiple tactile pixels that are incorporated in the Blind Pad could potentially be controlled in a new and more efficient way. Additionally, this project led to the fabrication of a printed circuit board (PCB) that would make the Blind Pad more compact and portable. This report therefore outlines the context of this project, its associated literature review, and the methodology used throughout the project. This report also includes simulation and testing results and their relevant analysis.
Development of interfaces for impaired users
pe.org.pl
Abstract. This paper presents EyeSEC, a project being conducted in DEE/ISEC in the area of Assistive Technology, which aims to create alternative technologies to compensate for functional limitations and facilitate the independence of elderly and impaired users. The ...