Using robots to improve the accessibility of online videos

People who are blind often learn spatial information and concepts through tactile and tangible representations. These representations offer an accessible low-cost solution, but often require large amounts of time to author or print. However as educational videos and animations become a primary medium for conveying educational concepts, this means that an author must spend time representing important key frames in an animation to make it accessible. In my thesis, I will be addressing this issue using techniques from computer vision, and leveraging inexpensive educational robot toys. My work aims to demonstrate how these existing devices often found around the home, can be used to increase access to online media for individuals with vision-impairments. Throughout this work I will learn how to use and design robots for accessible communication of motion, examine the use of these representations in educational environments, and create toolkits which enable other end-users to author accessible videos online.