Multimodal Interfaces for Representing and Accessing Geospatial Information

Abstract

Multimodal interfaces have a great potential impact in our daily lives and in the education of students in all grades. In particular, they offer significant benefits for people who are disabled. The use of tactile, haptic, and auditory interfaces has a potential to make technology more universally accessible. To this extent it will mitigate the rapidly expanding digital divide between those who are able to use computers to access the Internet and web page information (i.e., those who are computer literate) and those who are not.Information technology transformations are affecting how we communicate, how we store and access information, how we become healthier and receive more medical care, how we learn at different stages of our development, how business is conducted, how work is undertaken in order to produce income, how things are built or designed, how data is stored and managed, and how research is conducted. With the increasing emphasis on visualization as the main interface medium for computer based services, an ethical problem emerges regarding whether or not people who are visually impaired or who have other tactile, haptic, or auditory impairments that limit keyboard or mouse use should be increasingly disabled by the trend towards vision-based digital communication and information processing.We believe that such groups should not be shut out from the advantages offered by the use of this technology, just as we believe that multimodal interfaces will enrich the understanding of the computer-based input and output of information that is becoming a part of our everyday lives.This emerging digital divide has been recognized by former President Clinton's Information Technology Advisory Committee 103 . Their slogan incorporates a theme of universal accessibility. More recently, President Bush's directive that "no child shall be left behind" provides the incentive for more search and exploration in the area of non-visual and multimodal interfaces. Progress towards either of these goals would be designed to remove age-related barriers to participation in society, would reduce language and literacy related barriers among different groups in society, would enhance global understanding, and would engage more people in the process of information exchanges. But, the transformation of the

Combining 3-D geovisualization with force feedback driven user interaction

“…One such area may be the multimodal presentation of geospatial information to visually impaired students [7]. The use as an educational tool in courses teaching geomorphology has also been suggested.…”

Social Moderation and Dynamic Elements in Crowdsourced Geospatial Data: A Report on Quality Assessment, Dynamic Extensions and Mobile Device Engagement in the George Mason University Geocrowdsourcing Testbed

“…Based on the seminal work of Loomis et al (2005, Figure 3) 25 , Marston et al (2006) 26 , and Golledge et al (2006) 27 ; Rice et al (2011Rice et al ( , 2013b 28,29 presented the conceptual design of a geocrowdsourcing system for collecting transient obstacle information to assist blind, visually-impaired, and mobility-impaired individuals navigate through unfamiliar environments. The resulting GMU Geocrowdsourcing Testbed (GMU-GcT) has been presented and demonstrated in several previous publications, notably Rice et al (2013aRice et al ( , 2013bRice et al ( , and 2014.…”

Obstacle Characterization in a Geocrowdsourced Accessibility System

“…The GMU-GcT uses the positioning of reported obstacles in order to facilitate obstacle avoidance routing on a pedestrian network, which is motivated by the accessibility mapping and accessibility wayfinding work of Golledge (1999), Golledge et al (2000Golledge et al ( , 2006, Church et al (2003), Jacobson (1998), Pingel (2010 and Rice et al (2005). Implemented in the system are four methods of evaluating positional accuracy: (1) human-georeferenced geographic coordinates via computer, (2) mobile GPS coordinates from user's current position, (3) embedded geo-tags in an image of reported obstacle, and (4) convex hulls created from geoparsed text descriptions of the obstacle's location, based on a comprehensive gazetteer.…”