"Hey Model!" -- Natural User Interactions and Agency in Accessible Interactive 3D Models

While developments in 3D printing have opened up opportunities for improved access to graphical information for people who are blind or have low vision (BLV), they can provide only limited detailed and contextual information. Interactive 3D printed models (I3Ms) that provide audio labels and/or a conversational agent interface potentially overcome this limitation. We conducted a Wizard-of-Oz exploratory study to uncover the multi-modal interaction techniques that BLV people would like to use when exploring I3Ms, and investigated their attitudes towards different levels of model agency. These findings informed the creation of an I3M prototype of the solar system. A second user study with this model revealed a hierarchy of interaction, with BLV users preferring tactile exploration, followed by touch gestures to trigger audio labels, and then natural language to fill in knowledge gaps and confirm understanding.Comment: Paper presented at ACM CHI 2020: Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM, New York, April 2020; Replacement: typos correcte

Interactivity Improves Usability of Geographic Maps for Visually Impaired People

International audienceTactile relief maps are used by visually impaired people to acquire mental representation of space, but they retain important limitations (limited amount of information, braille text, etc.). Interactive maps may overcome these limitations. However, usability of these two types of maps had never been compared. It is then unknown whether interactive maps are equivalent or even better solutions than traditional raised-line maps. This study presents a comparison of usability of a classical raised-line map vs. an interactive map composed by a multi-touch screen, a raised-line overlay and audio output. Both maps were tested by 24 blind participants. We measured usability as efficiency, effectiveness and satisfaction. Our results show that replacing braille with simple audio-tactile interaction significantly improved efficiency and user satisfaction. Effectiveness was not related to the map type but depended on users' characteristics as well as the category of assessed spatial knowledge. Long-term evaluation of acquired spatial information revealed that maps, whether interactive or not, are useful to build robust survey-type mental representations in blind users. Altogether, these results are encouraging as they show that interactive maps are a good solution for improving map exploration and cognitive mapping in visually impaired people