Drawxi: An Accessible Drawing Tool for Collaboration

Visual impairment can profoundly impact well-being and social advancement. Current solutions for accessing graphical information fail to provide an affordable, user-friendly collaborative platform for visually impaired and sighted people to work together. Therefore, sighted users tend to have low expectations from visually impaired people while working in a team. Hence, visually impaired people feel discouraged to participate in a mixed population collaborative environment. Consequently, their generative capabilities remain devalued. In this paper, we propose an audio-haptic enabled tool (Drawxi) for free-form sketching and sharing simple diagrams (processes, workflows, ideas, perspectives, etc.). It provides a common platform for visually-impaired and sighted people to work together by communicating each other's ideas visually. Thus, enabling the discovery of generative capabilities in a hands-on way. We relied upon participatory research methods (Contextual inquiry, Co-Design) involving visually impaired participants throughout the design process. We evaluated our proposed design through usability testing which revealed that collaboration between visually impaired and sighted people benefits from the use of common tools and platforms. Thereby, enhancing the degree of their participation in a collaborative environment and quality of co-creation activities.