Web-based Multimodal Graphs for Visually Impaired People

Abstract

This paper describes the development and evaluation of Web-based multimodal graphs designed for visually impaired and blind people. The information in the graphs is conveyed to visually impaired people through haptic and audio channels. The motivation of this work is to address problems faced by visually impaired people in accessing graphical information on the Internet, particularly the common types of graphs for data visualization. In our work, line graphs, bar charts and pie charts are accessible through a force feedback device, the Logitech WingMan Force Feedback Mouse. Pre-recorded sound files are used to represent graph contents to users. In order to test the usability of the developed Web graphs, an evaluation was conducted with bar charts as the experimental platform. The results showed that the participants could successfully use the haptic and audio features to extract information from the Web graphs.

Web-based haptic applications for blind people to create virtual graphs

“…Sighted people were blind-folded during the experiment. As with our previous study, there were no major differences between blind people and blind-folded sighted people's performance on the multimodal graphs [9].…”

Beyond web content accessibility guidelines: Design of enhanced text user interfaces for blind internet users

“…Using this browser it is possible to use haptic displays to communicate threedimensional images to blind users. Yu et al (2002) developed web-based multimodal graphs designed for visually impaired and blind people. The information in the graph is conveyed through haptic and audio channels.…”

A Browser Extension for Providing Visually Impaired Users Access to the Content of Bar Charts on the Web

“…A number of projects have attempted to make images accessible to visually impaired viewers by reproducing the image in an alternative medium, such as sound (Meijer, 1992;Alty and Rigas, 1998), touch (Ina, 1996) or a combination of the two (Ramloll et al, 2000;Yu et al, 2002;Kennel, 1996). One particularly interesting project is that of Yu and Brewster (Yu et al, 2002).…”

“…One particularly interesting project is that of Yu and Brewster (Yu et al, 2002). In this project, they investigate the development and usefulness of web-based multimodal graphs which use haptic devices and auditory output to communicate the contents of the graphs to the users.…”

“…In this project, they investigate the development and usefulness of web-based multimodal graphs which use haptic devices and auditory output to communicate the contents of the graphs to the users. The web pages containing the graphics must be properly formatted with the coordination of embedded haptic and audio features controlled by Cascading Style Sheets (Yu et al, 2002). Although the evaluation of their system does demonstrate the usefulness of the approach when compared to traditional tactile diagrams, they note that the process of preparing the graphics is laborious (Yu et al, 2002).…”