The purpose of the study is to investigate the reliability of the general sporting ability (GSA) protocols to identify sports talent among persons with blind and visually-impaired and also aimed to ...examine the differences in general ability among persons with blind and visually-impaired on selected general sporting ability protocols in Klang Valley, Malaysia. 77 persons with blind and visually-impaired (33 male and 44 female) from special school for the blind, Kuala Lumpur participated the study and been choose through purposive sampling. Subjects went through test-retest method of 19 general sporting ability protocols. The study was analyzed used SPSS version 19. Intra-class Correlation (ICC) had been used to test the reliability of the test-retest for each protocol. Independent t-test was used to compare the differences in general sporting ability among persons with blind and visual impaired (totally and partially blind) on general sporting ability protocols in Klang Valley, Malaysia. According to the result, ICC showed more than 0.70. So, there are a strong correlation between test and retest result. There are significant difference between blind and the visually-impaired group based on the test protocols. There are need to create several appropriate tests to identify the ability especially for the blind group.
With the rapid advent of touchscreen devices, opportunities are increasing to develop innovative interfaces, including applications that combine touch input with auditory feedback to serve the blind ...and visually impaired (BVI) community. Targeted to blind high-school children, our innovative design, AEDIN (Acoustic EDutainment INterface), uses non-speech sounds simultaneously as navigational prompts and content icons/signifiers for recorded text-to-speech educational essays, which are the main content of this application. A study of two versions of AEDIN was conducted with 20 participants from a K-12 school for the BVI to evaluate its usability and identify ways to improve it. Through the collection of quantitative and qualitative data, we discovered key design improvements that made AEDIN a highly usable and enjoyable interface for these users. The paper highlights good design practices for acoustic interfaces.
This paper proposes a method for detecting brick path region in the outdoor pavement environment based on the analysis of color and shape pattern. The pavement typically consists of bricks with ...specific shape and colors. Furthermore, bricks form repeated structure. Thus the properties play an important role in recognition process. First, the image is segmented by color in order to detect candidate regions with similar color properties. Then the shape pattern detection based on edge structure of the block boundary is applied. The intersection point is extracted through the edge. The erroneous extracted intersection points are filtered out using angle histogram between intersection point and the center of gravity in each block. Finally each block has a perimeter vector as shape pattern and the similar blocks are detected as brick path. The experimental results are described in section 3 and they are analyzed that true positive is 86.52%.
This article is concerned with the problems of early intervention services in Slovenia. From the year 2000 onwards, also blind and visually impaired Slovenian children have legal basis for wider ...possibilities for integrated forms of education. The problem is that they formally still do not receive any kind of intervention by the special education teacher for visually impaired. The first step towards enabling equal opportunities for blind and visually impaired children and their families is thus in enabling their full early intervention, at which also special education teacher, qualified for work with the youngest blind and visually impaired children, will participate.
Improving accessibility to mathematical formulas Ferres, Leo; Sepúlveda, Jose Fuentes
Proceedings of the International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility,
03/2011
Conference Proceeding
Mathematics accessibility is an important topic for inclusive education. We tackle the problem of accessing a large repository of mathematical formulas, by providing a natural language description of ...the more than 350,000 Wikipedia formulas using a well-researched sub-language targetting Spanish speakers, for whom assistive technologies, particularly domain-specific technologies like the one described here, are scarce.
This paper presents a new holistic vision-based mobile assistive navigation system to help blind and visually impaired people with indoor independent travel. The system detects dynamic obstacles and ...adjusts path planning in real-time to improve navigation safety. First, we develop an indoor map editor to parse geometric information from architectural models and generate a semantic map consisting of a global 2D traversable grid map layer and context-aware layers. By leveraging the visual positioning service (VPS) within the Google Tango device, we design a map alignment algorithm to bridge the visual area description file (ADF) and semantic map to achieve semantic localization. Using the on-board RGB-D camera, we develop an efficient obstacle detection and avoidance approach based on a time-stamped map Kalman filter (TSM-KF) algorithm. A multi-modal human-machine interface (HMI) is designed with speech-audio interaction and robust haptic interaction through an electronic SmartCane. Finally, field experiments by blindfolded and blind subjects demonstrate that the proposed system provides an effective tool to help blind individuals with indoor navigation and wayfinding.
Better access to math for visually impaired Wongkia, Wararat; Naruedomkul, Kanlaya; Cercone, Nick
2009 IEEE Toronto International Conference Science and Technology for Humanity (TIC-STH),
2009-Sept.
Conference Proceeding
We propose, ¿MathReader¿, a tool to enable visually impaired students to independently and comfortably study and practice mathematics and science any time, any where. MathReader can automatically ...read aloud the equations and formulae with mathematical symbols in Thai. MathReader was initially designed to perform the speech generation in four main modules: Phrase Identification, Thai Text Reader, MathEx Reader, and Math Reader. Phrase Identification segments the input string into ordinary Thai text and mathematical expression parts since reading ordinary text is different from reading math. Thai text utilizes a four-level system with consonants, vowels and tone markers. Math expression is a multi-level system with alphabets, symbols and operators. Thai Text Reader generates the speech for the text part while Math-Ex Reader generates the speech for the math expression part. Math Reader combines all separated parts to form a corresponding speech of the original input. In this paper, the initial design of ¿MathReader¿ is discussed followed by some illustrative examples.
Acoustic interaction design through "audemes" Ferati, Mexhid; Mannheimer, Steve; Bolchini, Davide
Proceedings of the 27th ACM international conference on Design of communication,
10/2009
Conference Proceeding
This paper presents and discusses design decisions for an acoustic edutainment application for blind users called AEDIN (Acoustic EDutainment INterface), comprising audio elements used as ...navigational and thematic landmarks in touch-screen computers. We tested designs with blind and visually impaired teenagers. Preliminary results demonstrated the efficacy of AEDIN as an easy-to-learn and memorize architecture, and a potentially fun interface. The paper illustrates the lessons learned from the design and evaluation experience and contextually outlines new research directions for aural communication design.
Multimodal vision glove for touchscreens Manshad, Muhanad S.; Manshad, Ahmad S.
Proceedings of the 10th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility,
10/2008
Conference Proceeding
This paper presents the development of an inexpensive haptic glove enabling people with visual impairments to picture and interact with basic algebra graphs through multiple points of interaction on ...touchscreens. The glove sends vibrations to each finger representing a direction which the user must follow to reach a graph on a grid. Through repeated movement, a person will reach, trace, and visualize the graph. Evaluations by thirteen students with visual impairments indicated that visualizing a graph, using multiple points of interaction with haptic feedback, is much faster than single-point-interaction with audio feedback.
PDF
