IC2D: A Drawing Program for the Visually Impaired

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IC2D A Drawing Program for the Visually Impaired

• Hesham M. Kamel
• James A. Landay
• HCC Retreat, July 1999
• Group for User Interface Research
• EECS Department
• University of California, Berkeley

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Example Side View of a Car
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Presentation Overview

• Problems with UIs for drawing
• Design of IC2D
• Grid Recursion
• Examples
• Future work
• Conclusions

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Major Problems with Drawing UIs

• Graphical user interfaces
• total reliance on visual feedback
• imagine drawing with the monitor off
• where is the cursor?
• whats on the screen?
• how do I get back to where I was?
• Haptic user interfaces
• hard to carry
• expensive

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The IC2D Design

• Uses the telephone keypad model
• nine fixed screen regions or cells
• each cell is a unique point of reference that can
  be selected
• equivalent to pointing clicking mouse
• Two ways to navigate
• directional keys, or the numbers 1-9
• Gives feedback via voice synthesis
• blind users accustomed to screen readers

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Grid Recursion

• Allows more precise point selections
• resolution of 27 x 27 cells
• objects drawn at full screen resolution
• Permits drawing objects at different scale
• example, the right arrow

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Example Drawing a Circuit
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Conclusions

• Audio feedback can work for drawing
• Grid-based model allows
• point selections
• find previously selected points later
• drawing operations
• Pilot participants drew recognizable figures
• IC2D offers a protocol for graphical interaction

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For More Information

• http//guir.berkeley.edu/projects/ic2d/