Associating blind user designer product experience through design activities / Verly Veto Vermol

The lack of blind user experience understanding in design knowledge may lead to confusing preferences that are associating them with the designer in product development. Blind user touch experience feedback remarks important attributes to supply designer knowledge in designing through blind user familiarity. The problem of associating this knowledge cannot be solved simply by asking questions and surveys. There is an urgent need for an innovative approach to design activities, through product design investigation. Thus, the adoption of a strategic procedural design activity approach is needed to carry further identifying haptic imaging function and roles. This research trigger to associate attributes that influencing the blind user and designer through their experience. It specifically studies product components representation to design preferences and attributes. This research is based on data obtained from protocol interviews and observation that polled blind users and designers haptic feedback to product attributes factors from experiencing the complexity of haptic imaging modalities. The data were analysed to evaluate and determine the product attributes and its level of preferences that are influencing the strategic approach to the design development planning and management of product appearance for the blind user. The research suggested that successful procedural design activities are able to associate designers’ understanding of product physical and functional qualities feedback draws from the understanding of the blind user. The results of the study provide designer product sketch idea feedback pattern through haptic experience which incorporate principal issues discussed that associated to the product performances

Associating blind user-designer product experience through design activities / Verly Veto Vermol

The lack of blind user experience understanding in design knowledge may lead to confusing preferences that are associating them with the designer in product development. Blind user touch experience feedback remarks important attributes to supply designer knowledge in designing through blind user familiarity. The problem of associating this knowledge cannot be solved simply by asking questions and surveys. There is an urgent need for an innovative approach to design activities, through product design investigation. Thus, the adoption of a strategic procedural design activity approach is needed to carry further identifying haptic imaging function and roles. This research trigger to associate attributes that influencing the blind user and designer through their experience. It specifically studies product components representation to design preferences and attributes. This research is based on data obtained from protocol interviews and observation that polled blind users and designers haptic feedback to product attributes factors from experiencing the complexity of haptic imaging modalities. The data were analysed to evaluate and determine the product attributes and its level of preferences that are influencing the strategic approach to the design development planning and management of product appearance for the blind user. The research suggested that successful procedural design activities are able to associate designers' understanding of product physical and functional qualities feedback draws from the understanding of the blind user. The results of the study provide designer product sketch idea feedback pattern through haptic experience which incorporate principal issues discussed that associated to the product performances

Tactons: structured tactile messages for non-visual information display

Tactile displays are now becoming available in a form that can be easily used in a user interface. This paper describes a new form of tactile output. Tactons, or tactile icons, are structured, abstract messages that can be used to communicate messages non-visually. A range of different parameters can be used for Tacton construction including: frequency, amplitude and duration of a tactile pulse, plus other parameters such as rhythm and location. Tactons have the potential to improve interaction in a range of different areas, particularly where the visual display is overloaded, limited in size or not available, such as interfaces for blind people or in mobile and wearable devices. This paper describes Tactons, the parameters used to construct them and some possible ways to design them. Examples of where Tactons might prove useful in user interfaces are given

Exploring computer-generated line graphs through virtual touch

This paper describes the development and evaluation of a haptic interface designed to provide access to line graphs for blind or visually impaired people. Computer-generated line graphs can be felt by users through the sense of touch produced by a PHANToM force feedback device. Experiments have been conducted to test the effectiveness of this interface with both sighted and blind people. The results show that sighted and blind people have achieved about 89.95% and 86.83% correct answers respectively in the experiment

Design and User Satisfaction of Interactive Maps for Visually Impaired People

Multimodal interactive maps are a solution for presenting spatial information to visually impaired people. In this paper, we present an interactive multimodal map prototype that is based on a tactile paper map, a multi-touch screen and audio output. We first describe the different steps for designing an interactive map: drawing and printing the tactile paper map, choice of multi-touch technology, interaction technologies and the software architecture. Then we describe the method used to assess user satisfaction. We provide data showing that an interactive map - although based on a unique, elementary, double tap interaction - has been met with a high level of user satisfaction. Interestingly, satisfaction is independent of a user's age, previous visual experience or Braille experience. This prototype will be used as a platform to design advanced interactions for spatial learning

Constructing sonified haptic line graphs for the blind student: first steps

Line graphs stand as an established information visualisation and analysis technique taught at various levels of difficulty according to standard Mathematics curricula. It has been argued that blind individuals cannot use line graphs as a visualisation and analytic tool because they currently primarily exist in the visual medium. The research described in this paper aims at making line graphs accessible to blind students through auditory and haptic media. We describe (1) our design space for representing line graphs, (2) the technology we use to develop our prototypes and (3) the insights from our preliminary work

Web-based haptic applications for blind people to create virtual graphs

Haptic technology has great potentials in many applications. This paper introduces our work on delivery haptic information via the Web. A multimodal tool has been developed to allow blind people to create virtual graphs independently. Multimodal interactions in the process of graph creation and exploration are provided by using a low-cost haptic device, the Logitech WingMan Force Feedback Mouse, and Web audio. The Web-based tool also provides blind people with the convenience of receiving information at home. In this paper, we present the development of the tool and evaluation results. Discussions on the issues related to the design of similar Web-based haptic applications are also given

Hands-on haptics: exploring non-visual visualization using the sense of touch

No abstract available

Tac-tiles: multimodal pie charts for visually impaired users

Tac-tiles is an accessible interface that allows visually impaired users to browse graphical information using tactile and audio feedback. The system uses a graphics tablet which is augmented with a tangible overlay tile to guide user exploration. Dynamic feedback is provided by a tactile pin-array at the fingertips, and through speech/non-speech audio cues. In designing the system, we seek to preserve the affordances and metaphors of traditional, low-tech teaching media for the blind, and combine this with the benefits of a digital representation. Traditional tangible media allow rapid, non-sequential access to data, promote easy and unambiguous access to resources such as axes and gridlines, allow the use of external memory, and preserve visual conventions, thus promoting collaboration with sighted colleagues. A prototype system was evaluated with visually impaired users, and recommendations for multimodal design were derived