Visuo-auditory sensory substitution devices transform a video stream into an audio stream to help visually impaired people in situations where spatial information is required, such as avoiding moving obstacles. In these particular situations, the latency between an event in the real world and its auditory transduction is of paramount importance. In this article, we describe an optimized softwar...

This study reports experimental results on the effect of visual prominence, presented as gestures, on speech intelligibility. 30 acoustically vocoded sentences, permutated into different gestural conditions were presented audio-visually to 12 subjects. The analysis of correct word recognition shows a significant increase in intelligibility when focally-accented (prominent) words are supplemente...

The paper presents a formalized approach to designing the structure of a controller and its programming method for a multi-robot system equipped with diverse external sensors. It shows that it is sufficient to extend a universal programming language by a single robot specific instruction to program such a system. Although, a single complex instruction would suffice, it is much more convenient t...

The sequence of instruction and appropriate tools for novice learners of object-oriented programming has been extensively debated. This paper analyzes the learning environment for OO programmers, and presents a series of studies aimed at finding the sequence of instruction and the corresponding tool that best supports the learning of object-oriented programming, starting with objects first. The...

This paper presents a “think-aloud” study investigating the ability of visually impaired participants to make comparisons between haptic and audio line graphs. Graphs with two data series were presented. One data series was explored with a PHANTOM haptic device, whilst the other was sonified using one of two data sound mappings. The results show that participants can make comparisons between th...

The application presented in this paper aims at producing a novel user-friendly haptic environment to allow blind or visually impaired people to access interactive presentations based on HTML web pages. The application is based on haptic and audio feedback. Additionally, an automatic HTML-to-haptics conversion tool is developed in order provide a simple way to create interactive haptic presenta...

Tactile surfaces can display information in a variety of applications for all users, but can be of particular benefit to blind and visually impaired individuals. One example is the use of paper-based tactile maps as navigational aids for interior and exterior spaces; visually impaired individuals may use these to practice and learn a route prior to journeying. The addition of an interactive aud...

In recent years, we have seen the introduction and use of many distance learning systems. Some of these systems are characterized as Interactive which means the dominant mode of instruction is live or synchronous using networked multimedia technology such as audio, video and shared workspaces. In this paper, we present the common features and essential elements that should be implemented in suc...