Photography is a visual way to capture a moment in time. Photos can be used for artistic expression, and to remember significant events. Because photo taking, organizing and sharing traditionally requires visual information, those with no or limited sight often have problems with these activities. Previous work has made photo capturing without sight easier, however, there is little work that ma...

People with visual impairment face enormous difficulties in terms of their mobility as they do not have enough information about their location and orientation with respect to traffic and obstacles on their route. Visually impaired people can navigate unknown areas by relying on the assistance of canes, other people, or specially trained guide dogs. The traditional ways of using guide dogs and ...

This paper describes two studies concerning the use of haptic virtual environments for blind people. The studies investigated the perception of virtual textures and the perception of the size and angles of virtual objects. In both studies, differences in perception by blind and sighted people were also explored. The results have implications for the future design of VEs in that it cannot be ass...

Is it possible to show space relations to blind people ? Techniques and experiments described in this article explore several ways of accessing spatial information by blind people using one point forcefeedback device. The study focuses on two techniques supporting an orientation in buildings. Preliminary results show that a wider spectrum of different techniques suitable for blind people is nee...

This presented paper describes and examines 21 virtual environments developed specifically to support people who are blind in collecting spatial information before arrival at a new location and to help people who are newly blind practice orientation and mobility skills during rehabilitation. The paper highlights weaknesses and strengths of virtual environments that have been developed in the pa...

A system is presented enabling blind people to understand and ll in printed forms. Text and graphic components are separated from each other, the rst one presented by a Braille-line or alternatively via synthetic speech and the second one by a special swelling paper supplemented with markers for text events and markers for recognized ll in places. Furthermore a new method for the interpretation...

This paper describes an embedded device dedicated for blind or visually impaired people. The main aim of this system is to build an automatic text reading assistant using existing hardware associated with innovative algorithms. A personal digital assistant (PDA) was chosen because it combines small-size, computational resources and low cost price. Three key technologies are necessary: text dete...

Today, research focuses on the accessibility of explicit information for blind users. This gives only partly access to the information flow in brainstorming sessions, since non-verbal communication is not supported. Advances in ICT however allow capturing implicit information like hand gestures as important part of non-verbal communication. Thus, we describe a system that al-lows integrating bl...

Abstract: Some people automatically and involuntarily ”see” mental images of numbers in spatial arrays when they think of numbers. This phenomenon, called number forms, shares three key characteristics with the other types of synaesthesiae, within-individual consistency, between-individual variety, and mixture of regularity and randomness. An experiment was conducted to investigate whether ment...