An improved, low-cost tactile 'mouse' for use by individuals who are blind and visually impaired

Although tactile mice, such as the VT Player by virTouch, have been developed to enable access to 2-D graphical information by individuals who are blind and visually impaired, they have yet to really be adapted by the community. We suggest that this is due to the significant lack of accuracy in the haptic position information, which is critical for individuals to haptically piece together a 2-D graphic. In addition, the VT Player suffers from a noticeable lack of spatial and temporal concordance between the kinesthetic and tactile information. In this paper, we present a low-cost (<400 US) alternative that avoids these problems. Furthermore, the dynamic response of the pins of our improved mouse can range from 0 to > 300Hz. This will facilitate the use of vibration and texture, which our preliminary results show improves the saliency of graphical information.