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Touchplates: low-cost tactile overlays for visually impaired touch screen users

Published: 21 October 2013 Publication History

Abstract

Adding tactile feedback to touch screens can improve their accessibility to blind users, but prior approaches to integrating tactile feedback with touch screens have either offered limited functionality or required extensive (and typically expensive) customization of the hardware. We introduce touchplates, carefully designed tactile guides that provide tactile feedback for touch screens in the form of physical guides that are overlaid on the screen and recognized by the underlying application. Unlike prior approaches to integrating tactile feedback with touch screens, touchplates are implemented with simple plastics and use standard touch screen software, making them versatile and inexpensive. Touchplates may be customized to suit individual users and applications, and may be produced on a laser cutter, 3D printer, or made by hand. We describe the design and implementation of touchplates, a "starter kit" of touchplates, and feedback from a formative evaluation with 9 people with visual impairments. Touchplates provide a low-cost, adaptable, and accessible method of adding tactile feedback to touch screen interfaces.

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cover image ACM Conferences
ASSETS '13: Proceedings of the 15th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility
October 2013
343 pages
ISBN:9781450324052
DOI:10.1145/2513383
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 the author(s) 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: 21 October 2013

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Author Tags

  1. accessibility
  2. blindness
  3. guides
  4. hardware
  5. touch screens
  6. touchplates
  7. visual impairments

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ASSETS '13
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ASSETS '13 Paper Acceptance Rate 28 of 98 submissions, 29%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 436 of 1,556 submissions, 28%

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  • (2024)Enhancing Touch Circular Knob with Haptic Feedback when Performing Another Saturating Attention Primary TaskProceedings of the 2024 International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces10.1145/3656650.3656656(1-9)Online publication date: 3-Jun-2024
  • (2024)Leveraging stencils and capacitive touch devices to iterate in-cabin UIsAdjunct Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications10.1145/3641308.3685012(277-280)Online publication date: 22-Sep-2024
  • (2024)FetchAid: Making Parcel Lockers More Accessible to Blind and Low Vision People With Deep-learning Enhanced Touchscreen Guidance, Error-Recovery Mechanism, and AR-based Search SupportProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642213(1-15)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • (2024)“If You Don’t Arrange Your Bets Well You Will Still Lose”: Gambling Strategies of Visually Impaired StudentsJournal of Gambling Studies10.1007/s10899-023-10279-y40:3(1679-1700)Online publication date: 5-Feb-2024
  • (2024)Helping Individuals with Blindness or Severe Low Vision Perform Middle School MathematicsUniversal Access in Human-Computer Interaction10.1007/978-3-031-60884-1_5(58-77)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2024
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  • (2023)Developing and Deploying a Real-World Solution for Accessible Slide Reading and Authoring for Blind UsersProceedings of the 25th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility10.1145/3597638.3608418(1-15)Online publication date: 22-Oct-2023
  • (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
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