ASSETS. Annual ACM Conference on Assistive Technologies最新文献

We describe three usability studies involving a prototype system for creation and haptic exploration of labeled locations on 3D objects. The system uses a computer, webcam, and fiducial markers to associate a physical 3D object in the camera's view with a predefined digital map of labeled locations ("hotspots"), and to do real-time finger tracking, allowing a blind or visually impaired user to explore the object and hear individual labels spoken as each hotspot is touched. This paper describes: (a) a formative study with blind users exploring pre-annotated objects to assess system usability and accuracy; (b) a focus group of blind participants who used the system and, through structured and unstructured discussion, provided feedback on its practicality, possible applications, and real-world potential; and (c) a formative study in which a sighted adult used the system to add labels to on-screen images of objects, demonstrating the practicality of remote annotation of 3D models. These studies and related literature suggest potential for future iterations of the system to benefit blind and visually impaired users in educational, professional, and recreational contexts.

Sighted people can browse the Web almost exclusively using a mouse. This is because web browsing mostly entails pointing and clicking on some element in the web page, and these two operations can be done almost instantaneously with a computer mouse. Unfortunately, people with vision impairments cannot use a mouse as it only provides visual feedback through a cursor. Instead, they are forced to go through a slow and tedious process of building a mental map of the web page, relying primarily on a screen reader's keyboard shortcuts and its serial audio readout of the textual content of the page, including metadata. This can often cause content and cognitive overload. This paper describes our Speed-Dial system which uses an off-the-shelf physical Dial as a surrogate for the mouse for non-visual web browsing. Speed-Dial interfaces the physical Dial with the semantic model of a web page, and provides an intuitive and rapid access to the entities and their content in the model, thereby bringing blind people's browsing experience closer to how sighted people perceive and interact with the Web. A user study with blind participants suggests that with Speed-Dial they can quickly move around the web page to select content of interest, akin to pointing and clicking with a mouse.

Remote desktop technology, the enabler of access to applications hosted on remote hosts, relies primarily on scraping the pixels on the remote screen and redrawing them as a simple bitmap on the client's local screen. Such a technology will simply not work with screen readers since the latter are innately tied to reading text. Since screen readers are locked-in to a specific OS platform, extant solutions that enable remote access with screen readers such as NVDARemote and JAWS Tandem require homogeneity of OS platforms at both the client and remote sites. This demo will present Sinter, a system that eliminates this requirement. With Sinter, a blind Mac user, for example, can now access a remote Windows application with VoiceOver, a scenario heretofore not possible.

Navigation is a challenging task for many travelers with visual impairments. While a variety of GPS-enabled tools can provide wayfinding assistance in outdoor settings, GPS provides no useful localization information indoors. A variety of indoor navigation tools are being developed, but most of them require potentially costly physical infrastructure to be installed and maintained, or else the creation of detailed visual models of the environment. We report development of a new smartphone-based navigation aid, which combines inertial sensing, computer vision and floor plan information to estimate the user's location with no additional physical infrastructure and requiring only the locations of signs relative to the floor plan. A formative study was conducted with three blind volunteer participants demonstrating the feasibility of the approach and highlighting the areas needing improvement.

People who are blind or visually impaired face difficulties accessing a growing array of everyday appliances, needed to perform a variety of daily activities, because they are equipped with electronic displays. We are developing a "Display Reader" smartphone app, which uses computer vision to help a user acquire a usable image of a display, to address this problem. The current prototype analyzes video from the smartphone's camera, providing real-time feedback to guide the user until a satisfactory image is acquired, based on automatic estimates of image blur and glare. Formative studies were conducted with several blind and visually impaired participants, whose feedback is guiding the development of the user interface. The prototype software has been released as a Free and Open Source (FOSS) project.