Development of Audio Tactile Graphics System Using iPhone and Efficacy Evaluation

Blind people can access visual information by touching tactile graphics. Tactile graphics is a diagram expressed by raised points and irregularities. But, tactile graphics have problems. The sentences in the tactile graphic are often omitted and description of tactile graphic are showed separate sheet. So, blind people have to touch both of the tactile graphics and the separated braille sheet. Therefore, a systems that loads audio guidance function in tactile graphics is being developed or studied. However, because of the limitations of the existing audio-tactile graphics, few of blind people use the audio-tactile graphics. So, we developed audio-tactile graphic system which is easy to use for blind people. In addition, we conducted experiments using three types of tactile graphics to determine whether audio guidance is effective for understanding tactile graphic. As a result, the audio guidance was effective in understanding the tactile graphics, but it turned out that improvement of the system is necessary. This paper shows the prototype system for audio-tactile graphics, and describes the experimental results for the effectiveness of our system in detail.