Development of Audio-Tactile Graphic System Aimed at Facilitating Access to Visual Information for Blind People

Blind people can access visual information through tactile graphics. But, tactile graphics have some problems so that blind people need rich experience to understand tactile graphics. Therefore, systems that are implemented audio guidance capabilities to tactile graphics have been studied. However, because of the limitations of the current audio-tactile graphics systems, few of blind people use the audio-tactile graphics systems. Some of the reasons are as follows: (1) the systems use special devices which are often expensive; (2) the systems require users to produce dedicated graphics because existing tactile graphics are not available to the current systems; (3) since the special devices are large, this degrades the portability of the systems. Focusing on the above three problems, we are developing an audio-tactile graphics system executable on smartphones. In this paper, we show our current prototype system, and discuss the effectiveness of our prototype system.