A demonstration of the iCARE portable reader

Hedgpeth, Terri; Black, John A.; Panchanathan, Sethuraman

doi:10.1145/1168987.1169054

Cited by 11 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…The "Beyond Accessibility to Efficiency" (BATE) principle states that the goal of assistive technology should be more ambitious than simply to provide access [13]. A user with a disability should be able to perform a task with the same efficiency as anyone else.…”

Section: Figure 4: a Blind Player Playing Blind Heromentioning

confidence: 99%

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Blind hero

Yuan

Folmer

2008

Proceedings of the 10th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility

116

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Very few video games have been designed or adapted to allow people with vision impairment to play. Music/rhythm games however are particularly suitable for such people as they are perfectly capable of perceiving audio signals. Guitar Hero is a popular rhythm game yet it is not accessible to the visually impaired as it relies on visual stimuli. This paper explores replacing visual stimuli with haptic stimuli as a viable strategy to make games accessible. We developed a glove that transforms visual information into haptic feedback using small pager motors attached to the tip of each finger. This allows a blind player to play Guitar Hero. Several tests have been conducted and despite minor changes to the gameplay, visually impaired players are able to play the game successfully and enjoy the challenge the game provides. The results of the study also give valuable insights on how to make mainstream games blind-accessible.

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Section: Figure 4: a Blind Player Playing Blind Heromentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Research on technology for visually impaired people has primarily focused on web accessibility [5] and assistive technology [15,13]. There are approximately 10 million blind and visually impaired people in the United States, including an estimated 1.3 million people who are legally blind and 1.5 million who use regular computers [1].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Blind hero

Yuan

Folmer

2008

Proceedings of the 10th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility

116

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“…Reading assistance is one of the most explored research field: in [6] Hedgpeth and Black proposed a system aimed at helping the blind to read a book. The presented architecture was based on a personal computer, but the authors express the intention to create a portable and even a wearable version of their system.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

An open architecture to develop a handheld device for helping visually impaired people

Battaglia

Iannizzotto

2012

IEEE Trans. Consumer Electron.

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The wide availability of modern handheld devices equipped with powerful hardware, large memory and mass storage, a webcam and wireless connection suggests that they can also be used to develop aids for visually impaired people. Most of the handheld devices and software currently available for this purpose are quite expensive, cannot easily be expanded and are based on closed systems, while little or no effort seems to have been made to achieve integration between different applications. This paper introduces Blind Assistant, an integrated modular, expandable, open source software package intended for showing that producing effective and affordable aids for the visually impaired is possible, by easily porting software currently available only for cumbersome personal computers, with little effort and at low cost 1 .

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“…Rather than trying to somehow directly map scene information into audio output, it is also possible to perform some form of image or scene analysis in order to obtain a compact description that can then be spoken to the user. This is typically the case with devices for reading books, such as with the Icare system [81]. Programs that look for textual captions in images also enter in this category; they can be very useful for instance for accessing web pages in which text is often inlaid in images.…”

Section: Auditory Encoding For Vision Substitutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Image and Video Processing for Visually Handicapped People

Pun

Roth

Bologna³

et al. 2007

EURASIP Journal on Image and Video Processing

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This paper reviews the state of the art in the field of assistive devices for sight-handicapped people. It concentrates in particular on systems that use image and video processing for converting visual data into an alternate rendering modality that will be appropriate for a blind user. Such alternate modalities can be auditory, haptic, or a combination of both. There is thus the need for modality conversion, from the visual modality to another one; this is where image and video processing plays a crucial role. The possible alternate sensory channels are examined with the purpose of using them to present visual information to totally blind persons. Aids that are either already existing or still under development are then presented, where a distinction is made according to the final output channel. Haptic encoding is the most often used by means of either tactile or combined tactile/kinesthetic encoding of the visual data. Auditory encoding may lead to low-cost devices, but there is need to handle high information loss incurred when transforming visual data to auditory one. Despite a higher technical complexity, audio/haptic encoding has the advantage of making use of all available user's sensory channels.

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A demonstration of the iCARE portable reader

Cited by 11 publications

References 4 publications

Blind hero

Blind hero

An open architecture to develop a handheld device for helping visually impaired people

Image and Video Processing for Visually Handicapped People

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