Switching reference frame preferences during verbally assisted haptic graph comprehension

Haptic-audio interfaces allow haptic exploration of statistical line graphs accompanied by sound or speech, thus providing access to exploration by visually impaired people. Verbally assisted haptic graph exploration can be seen as a task-oriented collaborative activity between two partners, a haptic explorer and an observing assistant, who are disposed to individual preferences for using reference frames. The experimental findings reveal that haptic explorers' spatial reference frames are mostly induced by hand movements, leading to action perspective instead of conventionally left-to-right spatiotemporal perspective. Moreover, the communicational goal may result in a switch in perspective

Verbally assisted haptic graph comprehension The role of taking initiative in a joint activity

Statistical graphs are tools for multimodal communication in daily life settings. For visually impaired people, haptic interfaces provide perceptual access to the information provided by the graph. Haptic comprehension is facilitated by audio and verbal assistance. We investigate the circumstances under which verbal assistance facilitates haptic comprehension of graphs. For this, we focus on cases where unaided haptic graph comprehension has limitations, such as when describing a global (rather than a local) maximum. In an experiment that employed a joint activity setting, we observed two major aspects of verbal assistance for haptic graph comprehension, as indicated by post-exploration sketch production of the participants: First, the results revealed significant impact of the explorer as a dialogue initiator during the course of haptic exploration. Second, verbal assistance led to more successful graph comprehension when it was enriched by modifiers