Accessibility for Meeting Rooms for Visually Impaired People

Problem Participation of visually impaired users in co-located teamwork sessions is impeded by inaccessible interaction and communication modalities, such as non-verbal communication (e.g. pointing to objects) and analog visual representations of artifacts (e.g. notes on flipcharts, whiteboards or content of mind-maps). This problem is aggravated if relevant objects are spatially distributed on or above a table be it an interactive surface or not or in a room (for instance on several flipcharts). Approach In this project we propose to research support for visually impaired users to participate in and contribute to meetings more equally, by answering the following research questions with ICT centered approaches: What to Capture? Identifying, prioritizing, and analyzing inaccessible interaction and communication modalities of importance. How to Capture and Pre-Process? Generating an abstract and processable internal representation of important interaction and communication modalities. How to Make Sense? Conceptualizing and realizing the reasoning necessary for interpreting the processable representation. How to Render? Presenting the interpreted information via accessible modalities, specifically: established modalities, e.g. Braille and speech and innovative means of representation, e.g. tangibles. How to Manipulate? Providing interfaces for a more autonomous and seamless participation, via: established modalities, e.g. keyboard and automatic speech recognition and innovative modalities, e.g. tangibles and head-tracking. Outcome The project will lead to a thorough systematic understanding of inaccessible interaction and communication modalities employed on-surface, above-surface and in-room. It will deliver concepts for processing the information handled using these modalities, for rendering it and making it usable via accessible modalities. This will lead to a considerably more seamless and equal participation of visually impaired users in collaborative, co-located teamwork sessions with sighted participants.

Assistive technology and digital accessibility for blind and visually impaired people has significantly improved over the last few years. However, group conversations, especially in a business context, are still very challenging due to the common heavy use of non-verbal communication including deictic gestures in combination with visual artifacts, like whiteboards and presentations via projectors. As non-verbal communication strongly relies on the visual sense, which has a very broader bandwidth in comparison to the human hearing or haptic sense, a customizable and adaptive approach to on expose the blind or visually impaired user to only information that is wanted and necessary is of utmost importance. MAPVI project has addressed this issue by developing an accessible solution for brainstorming meetings combining gesture recognition and novel haptic and spatial user interfaces combined via an accessible software suite.