Showing papers by "Barbara Leporini published in 2021"

Integrating Wearable Haptics and Obstacle Avoidance for the Visually Impaired in Indoor Navigation: A User-Centered Approach

Abstract: Recently, in the attempt to increase blind people autonomy and improve their quality of life, a lot of effort has been devoted to develop technological travel aids. These systems can surrogate spatial information about the environment and deliver it to end-users through sensory substitution (auditory, haptic). However, despite the promising research outcomes, these solutions have met scarce acceptance in real-world. Often, this is also due to the limited involvement of real end users in the conceptual and design phases. In this article, we propose a novel indoor navigation system based on wearable haptic technologies. All the developmental phases were driven by continuous feedback from visually impaired persons. The proposed travel aid system consists of a RGB-D camera, a processing unit to compute visual information for obstacle avoidance, and a wearable device, which can provide normal and tangential force cues for guidance in an unknown indoor environment. Experiments with blindfolded subjects and visually impaired participants show that our system could be an effective support during indoor navigation, and a viable tool for training blind people to the usage of travel aids.

Distance meetings during the covid-19 pandemic: are video conferencing tools accessible for blind people?

Abstract: Since the first lockdown in 2020, video conferencing tools have been becoming increasingly important for employment, education, and social interaction. This makes accessibility and usability of these tools essential. For instance, are the main functionalities fully accessible to all users? In this study we analyzed accessibility and usability by visually impaired people using screen readers and keyboard. This involved an inspection evaluation to test the most important features and a survey of visually impaired users to obtain information about the accessibility of three popular video conferencing tools: Zoom, Google Meet and MS Teams. The results showed that Zoom was preferred to Google Meet and MS Teams, but that none of the tools was fully accessible via keyboard and screen reader.

An Enriched Emoji Picker to Improve Accessibility in Mobile Communications.

Abstract: We present an emoji picker designed to enrich emojis selection on mobile devices using audio cues. The aim is to make emojis selection more intuitive by better identify their meanings. Unlike the typical emoji input components currently in use (known as “pickers”), in our component each emotion-related item is represented by both an emoji and a non-verbal vocal cue, and it is displayed according to a two-dimensional model suggesting the pleasantness and intensity of the emotion itself. The component was embedded in an Android app in order to exploit touchscreen interaction together with audio cues to ease the selection process by using more than one channel (visual and auditory). Since the component adds non-visual information that drives the emoji selection, it may be particularly useful for users with visual impairments. In order to investigate the feasibility of the approach and the acceptability/usability of the emoji picker component, a preliminary remote evaluation test involving both sighted and visually impaired users was performed. Analysis of the data collected through the evaluation test shows that all the participants, whether sighted or visually impaired, rated the usability of our picker as good, and also evaluated positively the model adopted to add semantic value to emojis.