Expressive haptics for enhanced usability of mobile interfaces in situations of impairments

Designing for situational awareness could lead to better solutions for disabled people, likewise, exploring the needs of disabled people could lead to innovations that can address situational impairments. This in turn can create non-stigmatising assistive technology for disabled people from which eventually everyone could benefit. In this paper, we investigate the potential for advanced haptics to compliment the graphical user interface of mobile devices, thereby enhancing user experiences of all people in some situations (e.g. sunlight interfering with interaction) and visually impaired people. We explore technical solutions to this problem space and demonstrate our justification for a focus on the creation of kinaesthetic force feedback. We propose initial design concepts and studies, with a view to co-create delightful and expressive haptic interactions with potential users motivated by scenarios of situational and permanent impairments.Comment: Presented at the CHI'19 Workshop: Addressing the Challenges of Situationally-Induced Impairments and Disabilities in Mobile Interaction, 2019 (arXiv:1904.05382

Disability, Locative Media, and Complex Ubiquity

The current phase of network societies has generated an intensification of pervasive, ubiquitous digital technologies and cultures of uses, with emergent, complex social functions, and politics. In this chapter, we explore a fascinating, instructive example of the actualization of such ubiquity-effects — the case of locative media technologies designed for and by people with disabilities. In the meeting of disability and locative media technology, we find an apposite, challenging example of ubiquity — its associated, emergent social practices, what their cultural implications are, and how design makes sense of this. We discuss these dynamics of complex ubiquity and disability through two case studies: way-finding locative technology, smartphones and apps; and Google Glass.Australian Research Counci

‘Anthropomorphic drones’ and colonized bodies: William Gibson’s the peripheral

William Gibson tends to write in trilogies, as his first nine novels show. These series – the Sprawl, the Bridge, and the Blue Ant trilogies – are set in three different time periods and are populated by characters who reappear from one book to the next. Given this pattern in Gibson’s writing habits, 2014’s The Peripheral can be considered a new work, set in a separate universe from any of Gibson’s previous novels. However, in terms of its philosophical position, The Peripheral is the continuation of a career-long trajectory. Gibson’s work is consistently concerned with the relationship of the individual to their society and the interface between the two, as mediated through the senses. The Sprawl trilogy and the Bridge trilogy privileged vision as the most important of the senses, particularly in cyberspace where the body is left behind and engagement with virtual reality happens mainly through the eyes gazing on a computer screen. 2003’s Pattern Recognition, the first novel in the Blue Ant trilogy which went on to include Spook Country (2007) and Count Zero (2010), began to resituate the body and specifically the haptic as key to engaging with the world while The Peripheral takes this philosophical journey further, privileging the haptic as a key site of phenomenological engagement

Exploring haptic feedback for robot to human communication

Search and rescue operations are often undertaken in low-visibility smoky environments in which rescue teams must rely on haptic feedback for navigation, exploration and safe exit. The aim is to enable a human being to explore the environment using a robot. In this paper we evaluate haptic means for robot to human communication. We describe the testing procedure and the results of our first tests. Based on these results, we discuss improvements of our design

Enactivism and ethnomethodological conversation analysis as tools for expanding Universal Design for Learning: the case of visually impaired mathematics students

Blind and visually impaired mathematics students must rely on accessible materials such as tactile diagrams to learn mathematics. However, these compensatory materials are frequently found to offer students inferior opportunities for engaging in mathematical practice and do not allow sensorily heterogenous students to collaborate. Such prevailing problems of access and interaction are central concerns of Universal Design for Learning (UDL), an engineering paradigm for inclusive participation in cultural praxis like mathematics. Rather than directly adapt existing artifacts for broader usage, UDL process begins by interrogating the praxis these artifacts serve and then radically re-imagining tools and ecologies to optimize usability for all learners. We argue for the utility of two additional frameworks to enhance UDL efforts: (a) enactivism, a cognitive-sciences view of learning, knowing, and reasoning as modal activity; and (b) ethnomethodological conversation analysis (EMCA), which investigates participants’ multimodal methods for coordinating action and meaning. Combined, these approaches help frame the design and evaluation of opportunities for heterogeneous students to learn mathematics collaboratively in inclusive classrooms by coordinating perceptuo-motor solutions to joint manipulation problems. We contextualize the thesis with a proposal for a pluralist design for proportions, in which a pair of students jointly operate an interactive technological device

NotiFire : Hearing Impaired Alerter System Using Haptic Technology

This project involves designing a low cost haptic device that could help deaf students to be aware of the situation that will be identified through the research. This research will be using the tactile technology concept. As we know, nowadays, the world is very focus on productivity and achievement. Everyone is looking for a job to survive in this world, and this do not left those with impairment. As they now also been included in the working sectors, the environment of work place must be examine if it is suitable for them to work in usual surrounding. By identifying the hazardous situation for a group of hearing impaired that working in the lab environment

Virtual Reality for the Visually Impaired

This thesis aims to illuminate and describe how there are problems with the development of virtual reality regarding visually impaired people. After discussing the reasons how and why this is a problem, this thesis will provide some possible solutions to develop virtual reality into a more user accessible technology, specifically for the visually impaired. As the popularity of virtual reality increases in digital culture, especially with Facebook announcing their development of Metaverse, there is a need for a future virtual reality environment that everyone can use. And it is in these early stages of development, that the need to address the problem of inaccessibility arises. As virtual reality is a relatively new medium in digital culture, the research on its use by visually impaired people has significant gaps. And as relatively few researchers are exploring this topic, my research will hopefully lead to more activity in this important area. Therefore, my research questions aim to address the current limitations of virtual reality, filling in some of the most significant gaps in this research area. My thesis will do this by conducting interviews and surveys to gather data that can further support and identify the crucial limitations of the visually impaired experience while trying to use virtual reality technology. The findings in this thesis will further address the problem, creating a possible solution and emphasizing the importance of user accessibility for the visually impaired in the future development of virtual reality. If digital companies and developers address this problem now, we can have a future where visually impaired people are treated more equally, with technologies developed specifically for them to experience virtual worlds.Master's Thesis in Digital CultureDIKULT350MAHF-DIKU