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A tactile windowing system for blind users

Published: 25 October 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Today's window systems present the information in a graphical and thereby a spatial manner making the text-only access of a standard Braille device insufficient to enable blind users an equivalent exploration of the data. In this paper we present the planar Braille Window System (BWS) designed for a tactile display consisting of a pin-matrix of 120 columns and 60 rows. The system is composed of six separate regions enabling the user to receive different types of information simultaneously. The content of the main region containing Braille windows can be shown in various manners (text-or graphics-based) through four different views. The interaction within our Braille Window System is implemented not only by keyboard shortcuts but also by the use of multitouch gestures. Therefore the user is able to interact directly on the touch-sensitive display. A study conducted with eight blind users has confirmed the concept of Braille windows, regions and views. Especially the gestural input for exploring details of the content offers new possibilities in interacting within a GUI.

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Designing a Tactile Document UI for 2D Refreshable Tactile Displays: Towards Accessible Document Layouts for Blind PeopleMultimodal Technologies and Interaction10.3390/mti81101028:11(102)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
  • (2024)PRET Printer: Development and Evaluation of a Passive Refreshable Tactile PrinterProceedings of the 7th ACM SIGCAS/SIGCHI Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies10.1145/3674829.3675070(156-166)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2024
  • (2024)Lo-Fi Prototyping a Refreshable Pin DisplayHaptics: Understanding Touch; Technology and Systems; Applications and Interaction10.1007/978-3-031-70061-3_34(426-432)Online publication date: 30-Jun-2024
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cover image ACM Conferences
ASSETS '10: Proceedings of the 12th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility
October 2010
346 pages
ISBN:9781605588810
DOI:10.1145/1878803
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 25 October 2010

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Author Tags

  1. blind user
  2. braille
  3. gesture interaction
  4. planar tactile display
  5. screen reader
  6. tactile graphics

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Designing a Tactile Document UI for 2D Refreshable Tactile Displays: Towards Accessible Document Layouts for Blind PeopleMultimodal Technologies and Interaction10.3390/mti81101028:11(102)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
  • (2024)PRET Printer: Development and Evaluation of a Passive Refreshable Tactile PrinterProceedings of the 7th ACM SIGCAS/SIGCHI Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies10.1145/3674829.3675070(156-166)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2024
  • (2024)Lo-Fi Prototyping a Refreshable Pin DisplayHaptics: Understanding Touch; Technology and Systems; Applications and Interaction10.1007/978-3-031-70061-3_34(426-432)Online publication date: 30-Jun-2024
  • (2023)Experimental Evaluation of Multi-scale Tactile Maps Created with SIM, a Web App for Indoor Map AuthoringACM Transactions on Accessible Computing10.1145/359077516:2(1-26)Online publication date: 11-May-2023
  • (2023)Graphical Tactile Display Application: Design of Digital Braille Textbook and Initial FindingsHaptic Interaction10.1007/978-3-031-46839-1_10(121-134)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2023
  • (2022)Developing Dynamic Audio Navigation UIs to Pinpoint Elements in Tactile GraphicsMultimodal Technologies and Interaction10.3390/mti61201136:12(113)Online publication date: 18-Dec-2022
  • (2022)A11yBoard: Using Multimodal Input and Output to Make Digital Artboards Accessible to Blind UsersAdjunct Proceedings of the 35th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology10.1145/3526114.3558695(1-4)Online publication date: 29-Oct-2022
  • (2022)Accessibility-Related Publication Distribution in HCI Based on a Meta-AnalysisExtended Abstracts of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3491101.3519701(1-28)Online publication date: 27-Apr-2022
  • (2022)Motivation and Application of Haptic SystemsEngineering Haptic Devices10.1007/978-3-031-04536-3_1(3-33)Online publication date: 6-Nov-2022
  • (2021)A Systematic Literature Review on the Automatic Creation of Tactile Graphics for the Blind and Visually ImpairedProcesses10.3390/pr91017269:10(1726)Online publication date: 26-Sep-2021
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