Authors: Bogdan Troancă, Alexandru Butean, Alin Moldoveanu, Oana Bălan
in: 12th National Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, Bucharest, 2015
Abstract: The problem of blindness and other eye diseases is highly important as it affects millions of people on the globe. In the same time, the number of modern touchscreen devices is increasing fast. They are widely spread and becoming accessible for education purposes. For those who are born blind it is very difficult to imagine the world as it is and the struggle begins from the early school stages and continues for the rest of their lives. Modern touchscreen devices, also called smart devices, represent a viable solution for people with sight problems due to their rich multimedia experience. Thus, they can be used as assistive devices. This paper describes how learning basic geometric shapes using a smartphone or a tablet can improve several important aspects like: general feeling of using touchscreen devices, perception of a basic figure’s shape by simply touching the screen, intuition on how to follow a GPS map. This methodology represents only the initial stage from a long-term learning process that aims to help visually impaired people to understand and use the power of smart devices in order to perceive the world around them as normal people do.
Download link: Introducing_basic_geometric_shapes_to_visually_impaired_people_using_a_mobile_app.pdf (577 downloads)
