Display of Virtual Braille Dots by Lateral Skin Deformation: Feasibility Study

Vincent Levesque¹, Jerome Pasquero¹, Vincent Hayward¹ and Maryse Legault²(1) Center for Intelligent Machines, McGill University, Montréal, Canada.
(2) VisuAide Inc., Longueuil, Canada.

ACM Transaction on Applied Perception, Vol. 2, No. 2, April 2005, Pages 132149.

Other formats: ACM Digital Library, PDF.

Note to users of screen readers: This version of the paper was created specifically to make our work more accessible. Please contact Vincent Levesque if you encounter problems or if you have suggestions to improve the accessibility of this document. Note that the visual representation of raised or lowered braille dots are denoted as simply "raised" or "lowered" in the document, or in some some instances as "1" or "0".

Abstract

When a progressive wave of localized deformations occurs tangentially on the fingerpad skin, one typically experiences the illusion of a small object sliding on it. This effect was investigated because of its potential application to the display of Braille. A device was constructed that could produce such deformation patterns along a line. Blind subjects' ability to read truncated Braille characters (' lowered lowered ', ' lowered raised ', ' raised lowered ', and ' raised raised ') using the device was experimentally tested and compared to their performance with a conventional Braille medium. While subjects could identify two-character strings with a high rate of success, several factors need to be addressed before a display based on this principle can become practical.

1. Introduction

2. Virtual Braille Display

3. Parameter Tuning

4. Virtual Braille Legibility

5. Control Experiment

6. Conclusion and Future Work

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

Accessible HTML version by Vincent Levesque, January 2007. Originally published in ACM Transaction on Applied Perception, Vol. 2, No. 2, April 2005, Pages 132149. Original copyright notice: Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or direct commercial advantage and that copies show this notice on the first page or initial screen of a display along with the full citation. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, to redistribute to lists, or to use any component of this work in other works requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Permissions may be requested from Publications Dept., ACM, Inc., 1515 Broadway, New York, NY 10036 USA, fax: +1 (212) 869-0481, or permissions@acm.org.
2005 ACM 1544-3558/05/0400-0132 $5.00