Categories | Information visualization: Text | Interfaces: Auditory | Disabilities: Visual |
Description - The defacto standard in screen reader software, JAWS, costs over $800. JAWS sticks very closely to the stacked windows metaphor used by all modern visual window systems. Unfortunately stacking is not an audio concept. If two people are standing one behind the other, you can still hear them both; but in JAWS only the front most application gets to speak. What is worse, when a pop-up window appears it takes over the speech. We have noticed that the ideas of stacking and obscuration don't make much sense to some blind users. What would be an appropriate audio metaphor for the desktop? Perhaps the various applications could be represented as different individuals who have gathered in a semi-circle in front of the user. Using spatial sound each application could appear to speak from a different location. The user could choose to direct his comments or commands to any of the applications by directing his gaze toward it. This could make a neat paper or even a thesis topic.
Categories | Disabilities: Auditory | Interfaces: Auditory | Interfaces: Devices | Communication: Face-to-face | Social impact: Acceptance |
Description - How far are we from using a laptop to interpret ASL to speech? There are papers on recognizing ASL by processing video. Is a camera-equipped laptop powerful enough? Possibly as important, what *could* we do with a camera-equipped laptop? There are "gloves" designed for gamers, could that be used to help interpret ASL?
Categories | Disabilities: Visual | Disabilities: Auditory | Disabilities: Physical | Disabilities: Cognitive | Disabilities: Medical | Interfaces: Auditory | Interfaces: Visual | Interfaces: Tactile |
Description - Computer interfaces are mostly sequential. Consider telephone menu systems: enter 1 for parts, enter 2 for service, etc. As another example, when you kill an unresponsive program, Windows XP pops up a dialog asking me if you want to send an error report to MS. You must respond to it before proceeding. An alternative user interface strategy (for both sighted and blind) depends on asynchronous alerts and user responses. Think of the underlining of misspelled words in many editors; it occurs sometime after typing and can be corrected (or not) anytime. Emacspeak has some nice features like this. The presence of a footnote associated with a word is indicated by a audible signal played along with the speech for the word without stopping. The listener can respond to the signal by requesting the footnote be followed or ignore it. A project investigating what is known about asynchronous user interfaces and perhaps a prototype implementation would be really interesting and likely result in a paper.
Categories | Disabilities: Visual | Interfaces: Auditory | Information visualization: Maps and diagrams | Information visualization: Rendering |
Description - How can recording-based audio be related to image-based rendering? Is there a way to synthesize virtual sound environments based on recorded audio? How can sound environments be made more realistic? Applying this idea to a UNC campus map would be interesting. GB has built a system for recording audio with an array of 8 microphones arranged in a circle. Can we make realistic sound scapes of points around campus using the array?
Categories | Disabilities: Visual | Interfaces: Auditory | Information visualization: Maps and diagrams | Information visualization: Rendering | Social impact: Education |
Description - Is it possible (or even worthwhile) to make realistic sounds for audio simulations like a street-crossing game? How much does realistic audio improve such simulations over using synthetic sound effects? Research in this area would be beneficial to other projects that make use of audio environments for education.
Categories | Interfaces: Auditory | Information visualization: Rendering |
Description - How can spatial sound be put to use in a user interface? We've used it to convey spatial information from maps, but what about the location of text information on a webpage? Can it be used to create a virtual chat room where instant messages come from different directions, much like in face-to-face conversation within a group? Research new ways in which spatial sound can be put to use, and possibly develop a simple prototype.
Categories | Disabilities: Visual | Interfaces: Visual | Interfaces: Auditory | Interfaces: Tactile | Information visualization: Maps and diagrams | Information visualization: Rendering |
Description - What does it mean to 'zoom in' without sight? Can users without vision effectively zoom in and out of parts of images, maps, and diagrams to get more and less information? Research methods for using the numeric keypad with its directional layout to zoom into and out of certain regions on the screen. Try to develop an interface that allows navigation both in and out of the screen. Such a development would be very useful in displaying maps to the blind.
Categories | Disabilities: Visual | Interfaces: Auditory | Interfaces: Tactile | Interfaces: Devices |
Description - In most NC public schools the kids go to computer lab at least once per week. The sighted kids use interactive story books (click on the picture something interesting happens), ordinary games, and math tutor programs. The blind kids have NOTHING to do! Using commodity PC (or Apple) hardware, spatial sound, and force-feedback (haptic) devices like the Microsoft Force-feedback Joystick, make a game that is first fun, then maybe educational. Check out http://drive.soundsupport.net/ for an example of a driving game for blind people. "Adventure" (http://www.adventurecollective.com/index.shtml) might be an interesting game to adapt. Multi-player games could be really cool. What would "The Sims" be like for blind people? How about "Pac Man" or "Break Out"? There a lots of possibilities here for games addressing different age groups and objectives.
Categories | Disabilities: Visual | Interfaces: Tactile | Interfaces: Auditory | Social impact: Education |
Description - Kids who are blind often have poor muscle tone because they don't move around much. The idea of this project is to get kids to move AND to teach them something at the same time. So called "DDR Mats" such as the RedOctane Dance Pad http://redoctane.com/exreddanpad.html are intended for playing the game "Dance Dance Revolution" with the PlayStation or XBox. With an adapter these mats can be connected to the USB port on a PC. I think we could make a neat game something like Twister that is fun for kids and teaches Braille. The idea is for the child to use their hands, feet, head, or whatever to press the appropriate dots (up to 6) for a Braille character.
Categories | Disabilities: Visual | Interfaces: Auditory | Interfaces: Tactile | Interfaces: Devices | Information visualization: Maps and diagrams | Social impact: Education |
Description - BATS is a project at UNC that uses audio and tactile feedback to convey map information to blind users. It focuses on helping students with visual impairments.
Submitted by Peter Parente
Categories | Disabilities: Visual | Interfaces: Auditory |
Description - Nice collection of papers from a conference
Submitted by Gary Bishop
Categories | Disabilities: Visual | Interfaces: Auditory |
Description - vOICe is software that converts a visual image into a sound image. A vertical line scans left to right, representing brighter-intensity pixels as louder sounds and vertically-higher pixels as higher-pitched sounds. A blind person can wear a HMD consisting of a video camera + vOICe. The website has a *cool* Java applet that demos the software, allowing you to try the site's GIFs and your own images. Try drawing a grid.
Submitted by Suzanne Vogel
Categories | Disabilities: Visual | Interfaces: Auditory | Information visualization: Maps and diagrams |
Description - Map products for people with visual impairments.
Submitted by Gary Bishop
Categories | Disabilities: Visual | Interfaces: Auditory | Communication: Internet | Information visualization: Text |
Description - Spoken language access to lists of information.
Submitted by Gary Bishop
Categories | Disabilities: Visual | Interfaces: Auditory |
Description - A free webpage reader for Windows.
Submitted by Peter Parente
Categories | Disabilities: Visual | Interfaces: Visual | Interfaces: Auditory | Interfaces: Tactile | Interfaces: Devices | Information visualization: Text | Information visualization: Maps and diagrams | Information visualization: Rendering |
Description - This site has lots of information about orientation and mobility. Among other things, there is an entire book on teaching orientation and mobility to kids and a "living" book in progress about assistive technologies for wayfinding.
Submitted by Andrew Raij
Categories | Disabilities: Visual | Interfaces: Auditory | Interfaces: Tactile | Interfaces: Devices | Communication: Telephone |
Description - A combination PDA/Phone that uses braille and speech output. No visual display at all.
Submitted by Andrew Raij
Categories | Interfaces: Auditory |
Description - This is a Carnegie Mellon's speech research home page. Of particular interest is the phoneme dictionary which contains the phonetical breakdown of over 125,000 words
Submitted by Kelly Van Busum