Toward haptic mathematics: why and how

Understanding a mathematical concept, expressed in a written form, requires the exploration of the whole symbolic expression to recognize its component significant patterns as well as its overall structure. This exploration is difficult for visually impaired people whether the symbolic expression is materialized as an oral description or a Braille expression. The paper introduces the notion of Haptic Mathematics as a digital medium of thought and communication of mathematical concepts that adopts the nomenclature and language of Mathematics and makes its expressions perceptible as sets of haptic signals. As a first step toward Haptic Mathematics, the paper presents a system adopting an audio-haptic interaction whose goal is to enable visual impaired or blind people to reason on graph structures and communicate their reasoning with sighted people. The paper describes a first system prototype and some preliminary usability results aimed at evaluating the effectiveness of the proposal.