Navigation and Control in Haptic Applications Shared by Blind and Sighted Users

Haptic feedback in shared virtual environments can potentially make it easier for a visually impaired person to take part in and contribute to the process of group work. In this paper a task driven explorative evaluation is presented of collaboration between visually impaired and sighted persons in three applications that provide haptic and visual feedback. The results show that all pairs could perform all the tasks in these applications even though a number of difficulties were identified. The conclusions made can inform design of applications for cooperation between visually impaired and sighted users.