WCSE

Providing Graphic Content for Visually Impaired People using Haptic Feedback on Smartphones

Abstract— Due to limited visual ability, visually impaired people usually rely on tactile graphics to understand graphic content. However, such tactile graphics usually cannot be changed after creation, making it either inconvenient or impossible to deliver content that requires frequent updates. Therefore, this paper proposes to utilize the haptic feedback on smartphones to deliver refreshable virtual tactile graphic content to visually impaired people. A prototyped application providing haptic-enabled geometry shapes is developed and is experimented with blindfolded participants. The results imply that the participant can correctly recognize the experimented shapes and can further shorten the response time if a certain exploration strategy is used.

Index Terms— Accessible computing, visually impaired, haptic feedback

Chanh Minh Tran
Shibaura Institute of Technology, JAPAN
Nguyen Gia Bach
Shibaura Institute of Technology, JAPAN
Phan Xuan Tan
Shibaura Institute of Technology, JAPAN
Eiji Kamioka
Shibaura Institute of Technology, JAPAN

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Cite: Chanh Minh Tran, Nguyen Gia Bach, Phan Xuan Tan, Eiji Kamioka, "Providing Graphic Content for Visually Impaired People using Haptic Feedback on Smartphones," 2024 The 14th International Workshop on Computer Science and Engineering (WCSE 2024), pp. 68-73, Phuket Island, Thailand, June 19-21, 2024.