Consideration of the experience of a blind user using a tactile graphics editor available for blind people

Tactile graphics are widely used for blind people to access visual information such as maps, diagrams, and graphs and so on. Tactile graphics are usually produced by sighted people, but some of the blind people want to produce tactile graphics by themselves to express their ideas or opinions. A special writing utensil, called a raise-writer, is used when a blind person draw tactile graphics alone. A raise-writer consists of a cellophane sheet and a pen without ink. If a blind person writes characters or line-drawings on the cellophane sheet using the pen, the script swells so that the blind person can feel them. However, once a line has been drawn on a cellophane sheet, it cannot be erased or redrawn, and line-drawings using a raise-writer cannot be utilized by computers. To improve this drawback, we are now developing a system which enables blind people to produce tactile graphics without any help from sighted people. In this paper, we present our system, and discuss the effectiveness of our system through the experience of a blind user.