Evaluating information support system for visually impaired people with mobile touch screens and vibration

Throughout 6 months of blind user's touch panel usage interview, there were many problems of touch panel's audio assistant. The participant strongly demanded to improve the low accuracy and the slow software keyboard typing, and the poor understanding of the shape of the picture. She was also interested in recognizing the 3D shapes. Thus, we developed a fingertip tactile feedback system in order to indicate the "f" and "j" key for touch-typing and improved the speed of the software keyboard typing, and simplify the way to understand the 3D shapes. In this paper, we introduce and evaluate the recognition of the 3D shape by three participants using the system. The results showed that the proposed system succeeded in enabling the visually impaired participants to recognize the 3D shapes.