No abstract

The use of technology in educational settings is extremely common. For many visually impaired children, educational settings are the first place they are exposed to the assistive technology that they will need to access mainstream computing devices. Current laws provide support for students to receive training from Teachers of the Visually Impaired (TVIs) on these assistive devices. Therefore, TVIs play an important role in the selection and training of technology. Through our interviews with TVIs, we discovered the factors that impact which technologies they select, how they attempt to mitigate the stigma associated with certain technologies, and the challenges that students face in learning assistive technologies. Through this research, we identified three needs that future research on assistive technology should address: (1) increasing focus on built-in accessibility features, (2) providing support for independent learning and exploration, and (3) creating technologies that can support users with progressive vision loss. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing • Accessibility • Empirical studies in accessibility KEYWORDS assistive technology; teachers of the visually impaired; children with visual impairments

We discuss the development of Tactile Graphics with a Voice (TGV), a system used to access label information in tactile graphics using QR codes. Blind students often rely on tactile graphics to access textbook images. Many textbook images have a large number of text labels that need to be made accessible. In order to do so, we propose TGV, which uses QR codes to replace the text, as an alternative to Braille. The codes are read with a smartphone application. We evaluated the system with a longitudinal study where 10 blind and low-vision participants completed tasks using three different modes on the smartphone application: (1) no guidance, (2) verbal guidance, and (3) finger-pointing guidance. Our results show that TGV is an effective way to access text in tactile graphics, especially for those blind users who are not fluent in Braille. We also found that preferences varied greatly across the modes, indicating that future work should support multiple modes. We expand upon the algorithms we used to implement the finger pointing, algorithms to automatically place QR codes on documents. We also discuss work we have started on creating a Google Glass version of the application.

There are many educational smartphone games for children, but few are accessible to blind children. We present BraillePlay, a suite of accessible games for smartphones that teach Braille character encodings to promote Braille literacy. The BraillePlay games are based on VBraille, a method for displaying Braille characters on a smartphone. BraillePlay includes four games of varying levels of difficulty: VBReader and VBWriter simulate Braille flashcards, and VBHangman and VBGhost incorporate Braille character identification and recall into word games. We evaluated BraillePlay with a longitudinal study in the wild with eight blind children. Through logged usage data and extensive interviews, we found that all but one participant were able to play the games independently and found them enjoyable. We also found evidence that some children learned Braille concepts. We distill implications for the design of games for blind children and discuss lessons learned.

It can be difficult for a blind developer to understand and navigate through a large amount of code quickly, as they are unable to skim as easily as their sighted counterparts. To help blind developers overcome this problem, we present StructJumper, an Eclipse plugin that creates a hierarchical tree based on the nesting structure of a Java class. The programmer can use the TreeView to get an overview of the code structure of the class (including all the methods and control flow statements) and can quickly switch between the TreeView and the Text Editor to get an idea of where they are within the nested structure. To evaluate StructJumper, we had seven blind programmers complete three tasks with and without our tool. We found that the users thought they would use StructJumper and there was a trend that they were faster completing the tasks with StructJumper.