Conference Papers

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    SmartSlate: Rethinking tactile interfaces for the Blind
    (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc., 2014) Raghavendra, S.H.; Sankaranarayanan, S.
    In today's elementary education landscape for the blind, there exists little support for effectively visualizing concepts like figures, graphs, maps, terrains, shapes and the like. Moreover, pedagogy for the blind relies excessively on trained teachers. Current interfaces involve conversion of text to Braille (Tactile Feedback). Only text being translated however, is insufficient for a comprehensive learning experience. This paper describes a solution for this issue by introducing a redesigned low-cost tactile interface called the SmartSlate that will complement classroom education and serve as a partial substitute. The SmartSlate will support terrain and geographic projections, reiterative learning processes and educational games to enforce effective learning. As a proof of concept, an application that teaches coordinate geometry has been developed to work with the SmartSlate. This idea was well received at the Roman & Catherine Lobo School for the Blind, Kadri, Mangalore, India where our experiments will be conducted. © 2014 IEEE.
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    Ember: A smartphone web browser interface for the blind
    (Association for Computing Machinery, 2014) Jassi, I.S.; Ruchika, S.; Pulakhandam, S.; Mukherjee, S.; Ashwin, T.S.; Guddeti, G.R.M.
    Ember is a smartphone web browser interface designed exclusively for the blind user. The Ember keypad enables blind users to type using their knowledge of Braille. The interface is intuitive to the blind user because the layout consists of a very few large targets and remains consistent throughout the application. The verbal command option provides another dimension for user-interface interaction. Twelve out of thirteen users found that Ember verbal command navigation was easier than using a traditional web browser. Ten out of thirteen users found it faster to use the Ember tactile method of navigation compared to a traditional web browser. The learning rate for both the tactile and verbal command methods was faster compared to the learning rate associated with a traditional web browser layout. Finally it was seen that five out of five users found it significantly faster to use the Ember keypad compared to the QWERTY keypad. © 2014 ACM.