Concurrent Speech Synthesis to Improve Document First Glance for the Blind

International audienceSkimming and scanning are two well-known reading processes, which are combined to access the document content as quickly and efficiently as possible. While both are available in visual reading mode, it is rather difficult to use them in non visual environments because they mainly rely on typographical and layout properties. In this article, we introduce the concept of tag thunder as a way (1) to achieve the oral transposition of the web 2.0 concept of tag cloud and (2) to produce an innovative interactive stimulus to observe the emergence of self-adapted strategies for non-visual skimming of written texts. We first present our general and theoretical approach to the problem of both fast, global and non-visual access to web browsing; then we detail the progress of development and evaluation of the various components that make up our software architecture. We start from the hypothesis that the semantics of the visual architecture of web pages can be transposed into new sensory modalities thanks to three main steps (web page segmentation, keywords extraction and sound spatialization). We note the difficulty of simultaneously (1) evaluating a modular system as a whole at the end of the processing chain and (2) identifying at the level of each software brick the exact origin of its limits; despite this issue, the results of the first evaluation campaign seem promising

Interaction Methods for Smart Glasses : A Survey

Since the launch of Google Glass in 2014, smart glasses have mainly been designed to support micro-interactions. The ultimate goal for them to become an augmented reality interface has not yet been attained due to an encumbrance of controls. Augmented reality involves superimposing interactive computer graphics images onto physical objects in the real world. This survey reviews current research issues in the area of human-computer interaction for smart glasses. The survey first studies the smart glasses available in the market and afterwards investigates the interaction methods proposed in the wide body of literature. The interaction methods can be classified into hand-held, touch, and touchless input. This paper mainly focuses on the touch and touchless input. Touch input can be further divided into on-device and on-body, while touchless input can be classified into hands-free and freehand. Next, we summarize the existing research efforts and trends, in which touch and touchless input are evaluated by a total of eight interaction goals. Finally, we discuss several key design challenges and the possibility of multi-modal input for smart glasses.Peer reviewe

Accessibility of Health Data Representations for Older Adults: Challenges and Opportunities for Design

Health data of consumer off-the-shelf wearable devices is often conveyed to users through visual data representations and analyses. However, this is not always accessible to people with disabilities or older people due to low vision, cognitive impairments or literacy issues. Due to trade-offs between aesthetics predominance or information overload, real-time user feedback may not be conveyed easily from sensor devices through visual cues like graphs and texts. These difficulties may hinder critical data understanding. Additional auditory and tactile feedback can also provide immediate and accessible cues from these wearable devices, but it is necessary to understand existing data representation limitations initially. To avoid higher cognitive and visual overload, auditory and haptic cues can be designed to complement, replace or reinforce visual cues. In this paper, we outline the challenges in existing data representation and the necessary evidence to enhance the accessibility of health information from personal sensing devices used to monitor health parameters such as blood pressure, sleep, activity, heart rate and more. By creating innovative and inclusive user feedback, users will likely want to engage and interact with new devices and their own data

Supervised Segmentation of Web Pages for Vibro-Tactile Access on Touch-Screen Devices

International audiencePerception the visual layout of a web page and analyzing its DOM structure is a fundamental step in automatic adaptation process of web pages. In this paper, we present a new hybrid web page segmentation algorithm dedicated to vibro-tactile access on touch-screen devices. This hybrid algorithm combines three approaches for adapting web page contents to be presented on touch-screen devices, and for testing new navigation paradigm. The proposed algorithm is essential in our framework which aims to enhance the ability of Visually Impaired Persons (VIP) to navigate the Web by converting web pages into vibrating pages using a graphical vibro-tactile language. We present a comparison between automatic segmented pages (obtained by our proposed algorithm) and manual segmented pages. The objectives of this comparison are, on the one hand, to know how users understand web layout structures based on their visual perception , and on the other hand, to explore the main differences between automatic and manual segmentation