Haptic Perception of Document Structure for Visually Impaired People on Handled Devices

The dissemination of information available through the World Wide Web makes universal access more and more important and supports visually impaired people (VIP) in their everyday life. To access this information, VIP use screen readers to extract the textual information, which is displayed on the screen. The extracted two-dimensional information is linearized and is either written in Braille on a special output device or presented by voice output. However, on the one hand, some studies showed that impaired populations prefer to use commonly available software and hardware solutions rather than dedicated specialized solutions. On the other hand, we demonstrated in previous research that the perception of the document structure plays an important role in its memorization. In this paper, we propose to automatically generate vibrating pages from document layout skeletons based on the transformation of light contrasts into low-frequency tactile vibrations. First experiments on digital tablets show promising results in a “Design-for-All” paradigm.