Sonification of guidance data during road crossing for people with visual impairments or blindness

In the last years several solutions were proposed to support people with visual impairments or blindness during road crossing. These solutions focus on computer vision techniques for recognizing pedestrian crosswalks and computing their relative position from the user. Instead, this contribution addresses a different problem; the design of an auditory interface that can effectively guide the user during road crossing. Two original auditory guiding modes based on data sonification are presented and compared with a guiding mode based on speech messages. Experimental evaluation shows that there is no guiding mode that is best suited for all test subjects. The average time to align and cross is not significantly different among the three guiding modes, and test subjects distribute their preferences for the best guiding mode almost uniformly among the three solutions. From the experiments it also emerges that higher effort is necessary for decoding the sonified instructions if compared to the speech instructions, and that test subjects require frequent `hints' (in the form of speech messages). Despite this, more than 2/3 of test subjects prefer one of the two guiding modes based on sonification. There are two main reasons for this: firstly, with speech messages it is harder to hear the sound of the environment, and secondly sonified messages convey information about the "quantity" of the expected movement

The Application of Geographic Information Systems to Support Wayfinding for People with Visual Impairments or Blindness

People with visual impairments or legal blindness are relying on differing, comprehensive information utilized for their individual mobility. Increasing the personal mobility of people with disabilities and thereby achieving a self-determined life are major steps toward a more inclusive society. Research and applications on mobility issues of people with visual impairments or blindness mainly focus on technical applications or assistive orientation and navigation devices, and less work is covering the individual needs, e.g., regarding the information required for wayfinding. Moreover, active participation of people with disabilities in research and development is still limited. ways2see offers a new online application to support individual mobility in context of pre-trip planning for people with visual impairments or blindness based on a Geographic Information System (GIS). Obstacles, barriers, landmarks, orientation hints, and directions for wayfinding are generated by user profiles. The underlying network for GIS analysis is designed as pedestrian network. This individually coded network approach integrates sidewalks and different types of crossings and implements various orientation and navigation attributes. ways2see integrates three research realms: firstly, implementing a participative and transdisciplinary research design; secondly, integrating personalized information aligned with the individual user needs; and thirdly, presenting result of GIS analysis through an accessible designed user interface

μGraph: Haptic Exploration and Editing of 3D Chemical Diagrams

People with visual impairments or blindness (VIB) encounter diffculties in exploring graphical representations that are widely used for the study of STEM subjects. In particular, graphs are used to represent many different scientifc notations: fowcharts, automata, cognitive maps, and more. Among these, structural chemical formulae are characterized by a complex, often 3-dimensional structure, which makes them hard to access and author with traditional assistive tools. We propose \ub5Graph, a multimodal system that combines haptic and speech feedback to enable people with VIB to explore and edit structural chemical formulae. Two main contributions are presented: (i) a novel, non-visual interaction paradigm for exploring graphs and its implementation in the \ub5Graph system, and (ii) an extensive evaluation of the proposed system with 10 participants with VIB showing that \ub5Graph is thoroughly accessible and that the haptic feedback enhances understanding of the geometric properties of a graph

Accessible Mathematics on Touchscreen Devices: New Opportunities for People with Visual Impairments

In recent years educational applications for touchscreen devices (e.g., tablets) become widespread all over the world. While these devices are accessible to people with visual impairments, educational applications to support learning of STEM subjects are often not accessible to visually impaired people due to inaccessible graphics. This contribution addresses the problem of conveying graphics to visual impaired users. Two approaches are taken into account: audio icons and image sonification. In order to evaluate the applicability of these approaches, we report our experience in the development of two didactic applications for touchscreen devices, specifically designed to support people with visual impairments or blindness while studying STEM subjects: Math Melodies and Audio Functions. The former is a commercial application to support children in primary school in an inclusive class. It adopts an interaction paradigm based on audio icons. The latter is a prototype application aimed at enabling visually impaired students to explore function diagrams and adopts an image sonification approach

Visual Impairment and Blindness

Blindness and vision impairment affect at least 2.2 billion people worldwide with most individuals having a preventable vision impairment. The majority of people with vision impairment are older than 50 years, however, vision loss can affect people of all ages. Reduced eyesight can have major and long-lasting effects on all aspects of life, including daily personal activities, interacting with the community, school and work opportunities, and the ability to access public services. This book provides an overview of the effects of blindness and visual impairment in the context of the most common causes of blindness in older adults as well as children, including retinal disorders, cataracts, glaucoma, and macular or corneal degeneration