Co-located meetings, as a fundamental part of our professional and educational lives heavily rely on visual information. In such meetings visual information consists of a) the artifact or “content” part (as for instance in brainstorming meetings the mind maps) and b) of nonverbal communication elements (like deictic gestures and gazes). Blind persons to a large extent do not have access to thes...

Blind individuals have been deprived of the use of diagrams as a form of knowledge representation and an aid to problem solving as well as a means of communication. Our focus is on providing them with access to a specific type of diagram – the node-link diagram, also known as a combinatorial graph. Graphs figure prominently in computer science and software engineering as well as chemistry and o...

Across many cultures people conceptualize time as extending along a horizontal Mental Time Line (MTL). This spatial mapping of time has been shown to depend on experience with written text, and may also depend on other graphic conventions such as graphs and calendars. All of this information is typically acquired visually, suggesting that visual experience may play an important role in the deve...

Mental rotation tasks have been used to probe the mental imagery both of sighted and of visually impaired people. People who have been blind since birth display a response pattern which is qualitatively similar to that of sighted people but tend to respond more slowly or with a higher error rate. It has been suggested that visually impaired people code the stimulus and its (or their own) motion...

There are several barriers for the blind people to communicate with the external world through mobile phones or computers. For people with visual disabilities, the mode of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) primitively designed for sighted people are highly inconvenient to use. Different devices are invented to overcome this problem using Braille language. This paper audits some current problems ...

In this article, we discuss the challenges of document summarization for the blind and visually impaired people and then propose a new system called BrailleSUM to produce better summaries for the blind and visually impaired people. Our system considers the factor of braille length of each sentence in news articles into the ILPbased summarization method. Evaluation results on a DUC dataset show ...

We present a study about the use of current electronic travel aids to help blind people navigate through familiar and unfamiliar environments. We also discuss the main strengths and weaknesses of electronic travel aids and propose guidelines to design and use them adequately. We provide a proposal to develop and use traveling aids. As a result, this can be a first step towards defining major as...

Smartphones with sensors such as accelerometer and gyroscope can be used as pedometers and navigators. In this paper, we propose to use an LSTM recurrent network for counting the number of steps taken by both blind and sighted users, based on an annotated smartphone sensor dataset, WeAllWork. The models were trained separately for sighted people, blind people with a long cane or a guide dog for...

Since June 1999, UKOLN has worked with the Royal National Institute for the Blind, the National Library for the Blind and an independent library consultant on a major project, Reveal, that is part of an initiative to improve library and information services to visually impaired people in the UK. Reveal will be a webbased resource that will provide quick and easy access to information on the ran...