Feeling what you hear: tactile feedback for navigation of audio graphs

Access to digitally stored numerical data is currently very limited for sight impaired people. Graphs and visualizations are often used to analyze relationships between numerical data, but the current methods of accessing them are highly visually mediated. Representing data using audio feedback is a common method of making data more accessible, but methods of navigating and accessing the data are often serial in nature and laborious. Tactile or haptic displays could be used to provide additional feedback to support a point-and-click type interaction for the visually impaired. A requirements capture conducted with sight impaired computer users produced a review of current accessibility technologies, and guidelines were extracted for using tactile feedback to aid navigation. The results of a qualitative evaluation with a prototype interface are also presented. Providing an absolute position input device and tactile feedback allowed the users to explore the graph using tactile and proprioceptive cues in a manner analogous to point-and-click techniques

Atlas.txt : Linking Geo-referenced Data to Text for NLG

Peer reviewedPreprin

Developing an interactive overview for non-visual exploration of tabular numerical information

This thesis investigates the problem of obtaining overview information from complex tabular numerical data sets non-visually. Blind and visually impaired people need to access and analyse numerical data, both in education and in professional occupations. Obtaining an overview is a necessary first step in data analysis, for which current non-visual data accessibility methods offer little support. This thesis describes a new interactive parametric sonification technique called High-Density Sonification (HDS), which facilitates the process of extracting overview information from the data easily and efficiently by rendering multiple data points as single auditory events. Beyond obtaining an overview of the data, experimental studies showed that the capabilities of human auditory perception and cognition to extract meaning from HDS representations could be used to reliably estimate relative arithmetic mean values within large tabular data sets. Following a user-centred design methodology, HDS was implemented as the primary form of overview information display in a multimodal interface called TableVis. This interface supports the active process of interactive data exploration non-visually, making use of proprioception to maintain contextual information during exploration (non-visual focus+context), vibrotactile data annotations (EMA-Tactons) that can be used as external memory aids to prevent high mental workload levels, and speech synthesis to access detailed information on demand. A series of empirical studies was conducted to quantify the performance attained in the exploration of tabular data sets for overview information using TableVis. This was done by comparing HDS with the main current non-visual accessibility technique (speech synthesis), and by quantifying the effect of different sizes of data sets on user performance, which showed that HDS resulted in better performance than speech, and that this performance was not heavily dependent on the size of the data set. In addition, levels of subjective workload during exploration tasks using TableVis were investigated, resulting in the proposal of EMA-Tactons, vibrotactile annotations that the user can add to the data in order to prevent working memory saturation in the most demanding data exploration scenarios. An experimental evaluation found that EMA-Tactons significantly reduced mental workload in data exploration tasks. Thus, the work described in this thesis provides a basis for the interactive non-visual exploration of a broad range of sizes of numerical data tables by offering techniques to extract overview information quickly, performing perceptual estimations of data descriptors (relative arithmetic mean) and managing demands on mental workload through vibrotactile data annotations, while seamlessly linking with explorations at different levels of detail and preserving spatial data representation metaphors to support collaboration with sighted users

Design and evaluation of auditory spatial cues for decision making within a game environment for persons with visual impairments

An audio platform game was created and evaluated in order to answer the question of whether or not an audio game could be designed that effectively conveys the spatial information necessary for persons with visual impairments to successfully navigate the game levels and respond to audio cues in time to avoid obstacles. The game used several types of audio cues (sounds and speech) to convey the spatial setup (map) of the game world. Most audio-only players seemed to be able to create a workable mental map from the game\u27s sound cues alone, pointing to potential for the further development of similar audio games for persons with visual impairments. The research also investigated the navigational strategies used by persons with visual impairments and the accuracy of the participants\u27 mental maps as a consequence of their navigational strategy. A comparisons of the maps created by visually impaired participants with those created by sighted participants playing the game with and without graphics, showed no statistically significant difference in map accuracy between groups. However, there was a marked difference between the number of invented objects when we compared this value between the sighted audio-only group and the other groups, which could serve as an area for future research

Interactive sonification of spreadsheets

Presented at the 11th International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD2005

Raising awareness of the accessibility challenges in mathematics MOOCs

MOOCs provide learning environments that make it easier for learners to study from anywhere, at their own pace and with open access to content. This has revolutionised the field of eLearning, but accessibility continues to be a problem, even more so if we include the complexity of the STEM disciplines which have their own specific characteristics. This work presents an analysis of the accessibility of several MOOC platforms which provide courses in mathematics. We attempt to visualise the main web accessibility problems and challenges that disabled learners could face in taking these types of courses, both in general and specifically in the context of the subject of mathematics

The Drosophila anatomy ontology.

BACKGROUND: Anatomy ontologies are query-able classifications of anatomical structures. They provide a widely-used means for standardising the annotation of phenotypes and expression in both human-readable and programmatically accessible forms. They are also frequently used to group annotations in biologically meaningful ways. Accurate annotation requires clear textual definitions for terms, ideally accompanied by images. Accurate grouping and fruitful programmatic usage requires high-quality formal definitions that can be used to automate classification and check for errors. The Drosophila anatomy ontology (DAO) consists of over 8000 classes with broad coverage of Drosophila anatomy. It has been used extensively for annotation by a range of resources, but until recently it was poorly formalised and had few textual definitions. RESULTS: We have transformed the DAO into an ontology rich in formal and textual definitions in which the majority of classifications are automated and extensive error checking ensures quality. Here we present an overview of the content of the DAO, the patterns used in its formalisation, and the various uses it has been put to. CONCLUSIONS: As a result of the work described here, the DAO provides a high-quality, queryable reference for the wild-type anatomy of Drosophila melanogaster and a set of terms to annotate data related to that anatomy. Extensive, well referenced textual definitions make it both a reliable and useful reference and ensure accurate use in annotation. Wide use of formal axioms allows a large proportion of classification to be automated and the use of consistency checking to eliminate errors. This increased formalisation has resulted in significant improvements to the completeness and accuracy of classification. The broad use of both formal and informal definitions make further development of the ontology sustainable and scalable. The patterns of formalisation used in the DAO are likely to be useful to developers of other anatomy ontologies