TouchPen: Rich Interaction Technique for Audio-Tactile Charts by Means of Digital Pens

摘要

Audio-tactile charts have the potential to improve data analysis with tactile charts for blind people. Enhancing tactile charts with audio feedback can replace Braille labels and provide more structured information than pure tactile graphics. Current approaches lack especially in support of gestural interaction to develop useful interaction concepts for audio-tactile charts. Many approaches make use of non-standard hardware or are less mobile. That is why we investigated digital pens and their capability to increase data analysis with tactile charts. We compared two digital pens, in particular, the TipToi® pen and the Neo SmartPen Ml. First, we evaluated the implementation and feasibility of five basic gestures. While the TipToi® is not suitable to support rich touch gestures, the Neo SmartPen showed in a pilot study good support of single-tap, double-tap as well as hold and line gestures. On that basis, we implemented the first prototype to demonstrate the potential of digital pens to support data analysis tasks with audio-tactile scatter-plots. Afterwards, we evaluated the prototype in a pilot study with one participant. The study shows high indications for the usefulness of the presented system. The usage of the digital pen can improve the readability of a tactile chart. Our system provides audio-feedback for given tactile scatterplots in an accessible and automatic way. As a result, blind users were able to produce and use audio-tactile charts on their own by using an Android application and the Neo SmartPen.