How to move from Inclusive Systems to Collaborative Systems: the Case of Virtual Reality for teaching O&M

International audienceInclusive systems can be used both by people with and without impairments. This creates new opportunities for sighted and visually impaired people to collaborate with the same tool. Audio-tactile maps and virtual reality (VR) represent a safe and controlled environment for Orientation & Mobility (O&M) classes. These classes aim to teach visually impaired students to move safely and independently, in particular in urban environments, and can be seen as collaborative activity between teachers and students. To go further regarding collaboration in the classroom, the same virtual environment could be used in parallel by several users. The question of collaboration through awareness from CSCW (Computer Supported Collaborative Work) is extended to VR and accessible interaction. By implementing various facilities for mutual awareness sharing the virtual and physical environment, for users with and without vision, we open the question of inclusive collaboration

How to move from Inclusive Systems to Collaborative Systems: the Case of Virtual Reality for teaching O&M

International audienceInclusive systems can be used both by people with and without impairments. This creates new opportunities for sighted and visually impaired people to collaborate with the same tool. Audio-tactile maps and virtual reality (VR) represent a safe and controlled environment for Orientation & Mobility (O&M) classes. These classes aim to teach visually impaired students to move safely and independently, in particular in urban environments, and can be seen as collaborative activity between teachers and students. To go further regarding collaboration in the classroom, the same virtual environment could be used in parallel by several users. The question of collaboration through awareness from CSCW (Computer Supported Collaborative Work) is extended to VR and accessible interaction. By implementing various facilities for mutual awareness sharing the virtual and physical environment, for users with and without vision, we open the question of inclusive collaboration

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

Implementing an Android Tool for Visually Impaired Students of E-Learning

This article aims to describe the process of learning and development of an educational tool designed for mobile devices (smartphones) with Android technology. In summary, the application was developed based on the virtual learning environment Moodle and aims to develop a learning environment that supports the visually impaired students of e-learning, allowing them to ask questions, discuss and share ideas through forums and use chat rooms in real time. The fundamental purpose of this application is to cooperate with scientific knowledge in the sense that this is a representation of technological advance on the accessibility tools in distance education mode and provide comfort, flexibility and accessibility for the visually impaired students, realizing that education should always be inclusive

MultiVis: improving access to visualisations for visually impaired people

This paper illustrates work undertaken on the MultiVis project to allow visually impaired users both to construct and browse mathematical graphs effectively. We start by discussing the need for such work, before discussing some of the problems of current technology. We then discuss Graph Builder, a novel tool to allow interactive graph construction, and Sound Bar which provides quick overview access to bar graphs

Using remote vision: The effects of video image frame rate on visual object recognition performance

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below. Copyright @ 2010 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.The process of using remote vision was simulated in order to determine the effects of video image frame rate on the performance in visual recognition of stationary environmental hazards in the dynamic video footage of the pedestrian travel environment. The recognition performance was assessed against two different video image frame rate variations: 25 and 2 fps. The assessment included a range of objective and subjective criteria. The obtained results show that the effects of the frame rate variations on the performance are statistically insignificant. This paper belongs to the process of development of a novel system for navigation of visually impaired pedestrians. The navigation system includes a remote vision facility, and the visual recognition of the environmental hazards by the sighted human guide is a basic activity in aiding the visually impaired user of the system in mobility

Impact of haptic 'touching' technology on cultural applications

No abstract available