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

ASSISTIVE TECHNOLOGIES ON MOBILE DEVICES FOR PEOPLE WITH VISUAL IMPAIRMENTS

Spatial understanding and cognitive mapping are challenging tasks for people with visual impairments. The goal of this work is to leverage computer vision and spatial understanding techniques along with audio-haptic proprioceptive interaction paradigms for assisting people with visual impairments in spatial comprehension and memorization. Abstract space exploration in the field of assistive didactics is tackled through tactile exploration and audio feedback resulting in two solutions. The first one focuses on math learning in primary education while the second one focuses on function graph tactile exploration and sonification. In the field of spatial comprehension during way-finding for people with visual impairments, computer vision and spatial reasoning techniques are used for detecting visual cues such as zebra pedestrian crossings and for safely guiding the user with respect to the detected elements. Suitable interaction paradigms based on sonification and haptic feedback are designed to assist the user efficiently and quickly during the navigation

Airport Accessibility and Navigation Assistance for People with Visual Impairments

People with visual impairments often have to rely on the assistance of sighted guides in airports, which prevents them from having an independent travel experience. In order to learn about their perspectives on current airport accessibility, we conducted two focus groups that discussed their needs and experiences in-depth, as well as the potential role of assistive technologies. We found that independent navigation is a main challenge and severely impacts their overall experience. As a result, we equipped an airport with a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacon-based navigation system and performed a real-world study where users navigated routes relevant for their travel experience. We found that despite the challenging environment participants were able to complete their itinerary independently, presenting none to few navigation errors and reasonable timings. This study presents the first systematic evaluation posing BLE technology as a strong approach to increase the independence of visually impaired people in airports

WordMelodies: supporting children with visual impairment in learning literacy

We present WordMelodies, an inclusive, cross platform, mobile app that supports children with visual impairments in the acquisition of basic literacy skills through 8 different exercises. WordMelodies has been designed and evaluated by three domain experts in assistive technologies and education for children with visual impairments. After three design and evaluation iterations the app is fully accessible, except for one limitation of the cross platform development toolkit used

AudioFunctions.web: Multimodal Exploration of Mathematical Function Graphs

We present AudioFunctions.web, a web app that uses sonifcation, earcons and speech synthesis to enable blind people to explore mathematical function graphs. The system is designed for personalized access through different interfaces (touchscreen, keyboard, touchpad and mouse) on both mobile and traditional devices, in order to better adapt to different user abilities and preferences. It is also publicly available as a web service and can be directly accessed from the teaching material through a hypertext link. An experimental evaluation with 13 visually impaired participants highlights that, while the usability of all the presented interaction modalities is high, users with different abilities prefer different interfaces to interact with the system. It is also shown that users with higher level of mathematical education are capable of better adapting to interaction modalities considered more diffcult by others

The Present and Future of Museum Accessibility for People with Visual Impairments

People with visual impairments (PVI) have shown interest in visiting museums and enjoying visual art. Based on this knowledge, some museums provide tactile reproductions of artworks, specialized tours for PVI, or enable them to schedule accessible visits. However, the ability of PVI to visit museums is still dependent on the assistance they get from their family and friends or from the museum personnel. In this paper, we surveyed 19 PVI to understand their opinions and expectations about visiting museums independently, as well as the requirements of user interfaces to support it. Moreover, we increase the knowledge about the previous experiences, motivations and accessibility issues of PVI in museums

Modeling Expertise in Assistive Navigation Interfaces for Blind People

Evaluating the impact of expertise and route knowledge on task performance can guide the design of intelligent and adaptive navigation interfaces. Expertise has been relatively unexplored in the context of assistive indoor navigation interfaces for blind people. To quantify the complex relationship between the user's walking patterns, route learning, and adaptation to the interface, we conducted a study with 8 blind participants. The participants repeated a set of navigation tasks while using a smartphone-based turn-by-turn navigation guidance app. The results demonstrate the gradual evolution of user skill and knowledge throughout the route repetitions, significantly impacting the task completion time. In addition to the exploratory analysis, we take a step towards tailoring the navigation interface to the user's needs by proposing a personalized recurrent neural net work-based behavior model for expertise level classification

Hacking Blind Navigation

Independent navigation in unfamiliar and complex environments is a major challenge for blind people. This challenge motivates a multi-disciplinary effort in the CHI community aimed at developing assistive technologies to support the orientation and mobility of blind people, including related disciplines such as accessible computing, cognitive sciences, computer vision, and ubiquitous computing. This workshop intends to bring these communities together to increase awareness on recent advances in blind navigation assistive technologies, benefit from diverse perspectives and expertises, discuss open research challenges, and explore avenues for multi-disciplinary collaborations. Interactions are fostered through a panel on Open Challenges and Avenues for Interdisciplinary Collaboration, Minute-Madness presentations, and a Hands-On Session where workshop participants can hack (design or prototype) new solutions to tackle open research challenges. An expected outcome is the emergence of new collaborations and research directions that can result in novel assistive technologies to support independent blind navigation

Gonio, aequus and incognitus : three spatial granularities for privacy-aware systems

Many solutions proposed in the literature to enforce privacy in presence of location information use, implicitly or explicitly, spatial granularities. However, most of the contributions do not describe the formal and computational properties of this tool in details. In this paper we propose three families of spatial granularities, specifically designed for privacy-aware systems. We mathematically characterize them and prove that all of them have two important formal properties. Then, for each of them, we show how to efficiently compute two fundamental operations