Conference

Refreshable Tactile Graphics Applied to Schoolbook Illustrations for Students with Visual Impairment

Gregory Petit, Aude Dufresne, Vincent Lévesque, Vincent Hayward, Nicole Trudeau

Proc. ACM ASSETS 2008, Oct. 13-15, 2008, Halifax, Canada.

Abstract

This article presents research on making schoolbook illustrations accessible for students with visual impairment. The MaskGen system was developed to interactively transpose illustrations of schoolbooks into tactile graphics. A methodology was designed to transpose the graphics and prepare them to be displayed on the STReSS², a refreshable tactile device. We experimented different associations of tactile rendering and audio feedbacks to find a model that children with visual impairment could use. We experimented with three scientific graphics (diagram, bar-chart and map) with forty participants: twenty sighted adults, ten adults with visual impairment, and ten children with visual impairment. Results show that the participants with visual impairment liked the tactile graphics and could use them to explore illustrations and answer questions about their content.