An Approach for Improving Computer Human Interaction of Visually Impaired People

This paper introduces two research projects about the universal designed interfaces to improve visually impaired people’s computer human interaction. The one is the touch panel interaction of visually impaired people. Our final goal is to develop the universal-designed plugins that translate graphics into interactive contents with sound and touch interaction. As an instance, we proposed “One Octave Scale Interface (abbr. OOSI) as the graphical representation. Several touch panel contents with OOSI, such as a guide maps, a concentration game, and shape recognition puzzle of symbols, have been implemented. This paper focuses on the evaluation of shape recognition puzzle by visually impaired people, and reports the implementation and evaluation of single and multi touch display contents. The other research project is a collaborative music composing application. Recently, so many people have come to enjoy computer music. But the interface of the music application is too complex for children, the elderly and the visually impaired. In this paper, our goal is to propose a universal design collaborative music application for everybody with due consideration for visually impaired people. We employed tangible interface using daily goods and stationeries with AR markers, and a dining table. We developed two prototype systems. By using the first prototype, we confirmed the effectiveness of our interface that consists of clip type objects and string type objects. It was also confirmed that the interface has an advantage in promoting collaboration between sighted and visually impaired people. To improve the multiuser collaborative functions, we developed the second prototype system with stylish daily objects and rich sound interaction.