Verbally Assisted Virtual-Environment Tactile Maps: A Prototype System

Tactile maps are non-visual substitutes for visual maps for blind and visually impaired people. In [3, 11] we suggested to increase the effectiveness of tactile maps by developing a system that generates assisting utterances to facilitate knowledge acquisition. The utterances are inspired by a corpus of assisting utterances given to tactile map explorers by human assistants. The tactile maps are realized as virtual tactile maps presented with a haptic device. The effectiveness of such a system was tested before implementation in controlled experiments reported in [10, 7]. We discuss a prototype system that was developed according to our earlier suggestions. In a user study, we positively evaluated the behavior of the prototype.