For people with upper limb disabilities visual art is an important activity that allows for expression of individuality and independence. They show remarkable endurance, patience and determination to adapt their remaining capabilities to create visual art. There are significant advantages of digital technologies in assisting artists with upper limb disabilities. Paralinguistic voice recognition technologies have proven to be a particularly promising mode of interaction. Despite these benefits, technological support for people with upper limb disabilities to create visual art is scarce. This paper reports on a number of case studies of several artists with upper limb disabilities. These case studies illustrate the struggles they face to be creative and also show the significant advantages of digital technologies in assisting such artists. An investigation into people's ability to use the volume of their voice to control cursor movement to create drawings on the screen is also reported. With motivation, training and practise, use of volume to control drawing tasks shows great promise. It is believed that paralinguistic voice has wider implications beyond assisting artists with upper limb disabilities, such as: an alternative mode of interaction for disabled people to perform tasks other than creating visual art, alternative mode of interaction for hands busy environments and as a voice training system for people with speech impairments.
The support of human creativity by information and communication technology is an important and interesting area for research. To advance our research in this complex area our approach has been to go back to first principles and study examples of creativity in action. In this paper, we describe in some detail the creative practices of two artists. Their work is particularly interesting to us because of the way it straddles the digital-atomic border. Their creative practices involve not only manipulating paint atoms but also manipulating digital bits. From these studies we identify a number of interesting creativity support areas that suggest further investigation.
In this paper, we report on our investigation into people's ability to use the volume of their voice to control cursor movement to create drawings. Early analysis of the results show changing the volume of the voice as an interaction method is a concept that is easily understood by users. People find changing the volume of their voice comfortable, natural and intuitive. With motivation, training and practice use of volume to control drawing tasks shows great promise. This is especially hopeful for artists with upper limb disabilities who show remarkable endurance, patience and determination to create art with whatever means available to them. We have also identified several design recommendations that may improve the control and performance of such a system. We believe that volume control has wider implications beyond assisting artists with upper limb disabilities. Some possible implications may be: as an alternative mode of interaction for disabled people to perform tasks other than creating visual art or for hands busy environments and as a voice training system for people with speech impairments.
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