Designing a learning environment for visually impaired and blind persons in order to develop touch access to digital content
Résumé
Through screen-reader and Braille display, trained blind persons can nowadays manage to access to a lot of activities using computers. However, graphical interfaces and content where the spatial dimension is essential for understanding, like charts, pictures or the majority of videogames, are remaining hardly accessible. The Tactos and Intertact.net technologies are aimed to overcome these limits by providing an efficient sensory supplementation technology enabling blind users to access the spatial dimension of content through touch. Following a participatory design approach, we have worked in cooperation with blind persons to develop a learning environment for touch access to digital content with Tactos. Adoption is important when it comes to develop technologies and we report here on the research we conduct for enabling an independent learning of our system by blind persons. From our perspective, this possibility is a cornerstone for the development of a users’ community.