scholarly journals Bringing Things Closer: Enhancing Low-Vision Interaction Experience with Office Productivity Applications

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (EICS) ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Hae-Na Lee ◽  
Vikas Ashok ◽  
IV Ramakrishnan
Keyword(s):  
Assistive Technology ◽  
User Study ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Low Vision ◽  
Spatial Separation ◽  
Usability Study ◽  
Presentation Software ◽  
Screen Magnifier ◽  
Word Processors ◽  
Grid Layout

Many people with low vision rely on screen-magnifier assistive technology to interact with productivity applications such as word processors, spreadsheets, and presentation software. Despite the importance of these applications, little is known about their usability with respect to low-vision screen-magnifier users. To fill this knowledge gap, we conducted a usability study with 10 low-vision participants having different eye conditions. In this study, we observed that most usability issues were predominantly due to high spatial separation between main edit area and command ribbons on the screen, as well as the wide span grid-layout of command ribbons; these two GUI aspects did not gel with the screen-magnifier interface due to lack of instantaneous WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) feedback after applying commands, given that the participants could only view a portion of the screen at any time. Informed by the study findings, we developed MagPro, an augmentation to productivity applications, which significantly improves usability by not only bringing application commands as close as possible to the user's current viewport focus, but also enabling easy and straightforward exploration of these commands using simple mouse actions. A user study with nine participants revealed that MagPro significantly reduced the time and workload to do routine command-access tasks, compared to using the state-of-the-art screen magnifier.

State-of-the-Art Assistive Technology for People with Dementia

2013 ◽  
pp. 1606-1625
Author(s):  
Clifton Phua ◽  
Patrice Claude Roy ◽  
Hamdi Aloulou ◽  
Jit Biswas ◽  
Andrei Tolstikov ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Assistive Technology ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Smart Homes ◽  
The Elderly ◽  
Plan Recognition ◽  
Social Health ◽  
People With Dementia ◽  
Caregiver Needs ◽  
Remote Care

The work is motivated by the expanding demand and limited supply of long-term personal care for People with Dementia (PwD), and assistive technology as an alternative. Telecare allows PwD to live in the comfort of their homes for a longer time. It is challenging to have remote care in smart homes with ambient intelligence, using devices, networks, and activity and plan recognition. Our scope is limited to mostly related work on existing execution environments in smart homes, and activity and plan recognition algorithms which can be applied to PwD living in smart homes. PwD and caregiver needs are addressed in a more holistic healthcare approach, domain challenges include doctor validation and erroneous behaviour, and technical challenges include high maintenance and low accuracy. State-of-the-art devices, networks, activity and plan recognition for physical health are presented; ideas for developing mental training for mental health and social networking for social health are explored. There are two implications of this work: more needs to be done for assistive technology to improve PwD’s mental and social health, and assistive software is not highly accurate and persuasive yet. Our work applies not only to PwD, but also the elderly without dementia and people with intellectual disabilities.

Mobile Text Reader for People with Low Vision

2015 ◽  
Vol 74 (6) ◽  
Author(s):  
Teng Ren Sin ◽  
Eileen Su Lee Ming ◽  
Yeong Che Fai ◽  
Ong Jian Fu ◽  
Sim Yang Shane
Keyword(s):  
Mobile Application ◽  
Character Recognition ◽  
Optical Character Recognition ◽  
Reading Ability ◽  
Low Vision ◽  
Image Stitching ◽  
Text To Speech ◽  
Composite Image ◽  
Text Information ◽  
Screen Magnifier

People with low vision have visual acuity less than 6/18 and at least 3/60 in the better eye, with correction. The limited vision requires them to enhance their reading ability using magnifying glass or electronic screen magnifier. However, people with severe low vision have difficulty and suffer fatigue from using such assistive tool. This paper presents the development of a mobile text reader dedicated for people with low vision. The mobile text reader is developed as a mobile application that allows user to capture an image of texts and then translate the texts into audio format. One main contribution of this work compared to typical optical character recognition (OCR) engines or text-to-speech engines is the addition of image stitching feature. The image stitching feature can produce one single image from multiple poorly aligned images, and is integrated into the process of image acquisition. Either single or composite image is subsequently uploaded to a cloud-based OCR engine for robust character recognition. Eventually, a text-to-speech (TTS) synthesizer reproduces the word recognized in a natural-sounding speech. The whole series of computation is implemented as a mobile application to be run from a smartphone, allowing the visual impaired to access text information independently. 

Perceptions of Assistive Technology by Teachers of Students with Visual Impairments in Jordan

2020 ◽  
Vol 114 (6) ◽  
pp. 488-501
Author(s):  
Eman Al-Zboon
Keyword(s):  
Assistive Technology ◽  
Low Vision ◽  
Comparative Method ◽  
Visual Impairments ◽  
Negative Effects ◽  
Financial Barriers ◽  
Ethical Practices ◽  
Community Attitudes ◽  
Awareness Programs ◽  
Effective Use

Introduction: Ethical practices and technology are current trends in education for individuals with disabilities. This study investigates the perceptions of assistive technology expressed by teachers of students with visual impairments (i.e., blindness or low vision) in Jordan. Methods: The research involved 20 teachers. Data were collected via semistructured interviews and analysis carried out via the constant-comparative method. Results: The results highlight the challenges that teachers perceive in using assistive technology with their students, particularly regarding computer use, the willingness of a child to use a particular device, the lack of such technologies in schools and in the home, and a lack of training in the home. The results highlight perceived external barriers to the effective use of assistive technology, including those related to finance, training, societal attitudes, and family support. It appears that assistive technology can also have negative effects, which can be considered an ethical issue, since such technologies can expose students with visual impairments to negative community attitudes, addiction, bullying, abuse, and extremism. Discussion: Teachers highlight the issues they experience in using assistive technology with students with visual impairments in Jordan, which can be explained by the contextual conditions in the country. Implications for practitioners: Decision-makers in the field of visual impairment need to consider these issues through providing professional development, addressing financial barriers, and conducting awareness programs for students regarding the effective use of assistive technology.

Office Task Lighting: A user study of six task lights by five workers with low vision

1999 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 117-120
Author(s):  
Michael Wright ◽  
Sarah Hill ◽  
Geoffrey Cook
Keyword(s):  
User Study ◽  
Low Vision ◽  
Task Lighting

scholarly journals Generating Robust Audio Adversarial Examples with Temporal Dependency

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hongting Zhang ◽  
Pan Zhou ◽  
Qiben Yan ◽  
Xiao-Yang Liu
Keyword(s):  
Speech Recognition ◽  
Automatic Speech Recognition ◽  
Defense Mechanisms ◽  
User Study ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Temporal Structure ◽  
Human Perception ◽  
Experimental Results ◽  
Low Intensity ◽  
Adversarial Examples

Audio adversarial examples, imperceptible to humans, have been constructed to attack automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. However, the adversarial examples generated by existing approaches usually incorporate noticeable noises, especially during the periods of silences and pauses. Moreover, the added noises often break temporal dependency property of the original audio, which can be easily detected by state-of-the-art defense mechanisms. In this paper, we propose a new Iterative Proportional Clipping (IPC) algorithm that preserves temporal dependency in audios for generating more robust adversarial examples. We are motivated by an observation that the temporal dependency in audios imposes a significant effect on human perception. Following our observation, we leverage a proportional clipping strategy to reduce noise during the low-intensity periods. Experimental results and user study both suggest that the generated adversarial examples can significantly reduce human-perceptible noises and resist the defenses based on the temporal structure.

A tool for semi-automatic ground truth annotation of traffic videos

2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (16) ◽  
pp. 200-1-200-7
Author(s):  
Florian Groh ◽  
Dominik Schörkhuber ◽  
Margrit Gelautz
Keyword(s):  
User Study ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
User Interaction ◽  
Ground Truth ◽  
Automatic Annotation ◽  
Video Traffic ◽  
Ground Truth Data ◽  
Lighting Conditions ◽  
Ground Truth Generation ◽  
Dynamic Lighting

We have developed a semi-automatic annotation tool – “CVL Annotator” – for bounding box ground truth generation in videos. Our research is particularly motivated by the need for reference annotations of challenging nighttime traffic scenes with highly dynamic lighting conditions due to reflections, headlights and halos from oncoming traffic. Our tool incorporates a suite of different state-of-the-art tracking algorithms in order to minimize the amount of human input necessary to generate high-quality ground truth data. We focus our user interface on the premise of minimizing user interaction and visualizing all information relevant to the user at a glance. We perform a preliminary user study to measure the amount of time and clicks necessary to produce ground truth annotations of video traffic scenes and evaluate the accuracy of the final annotation results.

Assistive Technology Use among Older Adults with Vision Loss: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Canadian Newspapers

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Katharine Fuchigami ◽  
Colleen Mcgrath ◽  
Jordana Bengall ◽  
Stephanie Kim ◽  
Debbie Laliberte Rudman
Keyword(s):  
Older Adults ◽  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Assistive Technology ◽  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Technology Use ◽  
Collaborative Design ◽  
Vision Loss ◽  
Low Vision ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Full Text Review

Abstract Low vision assistive devices are often positioned as enabling continued social participation and engagement by older adults in everyday activities; however, previous research suggests that the use of such technologies is restricted by various environmental factors. With little attention previously paid to the discursive environment, this critical discourse analysis critically examined how aging persons with vision loss and assistive technology (AT) were constructed and the occupational possibilities promoted and marginalized through technology use in six Canadian newspapers. In total, 7,289 articles were screened, 1,867 articles underwent a full-text review, and 51 articles were selected for data analysis. Results highlight four key discursive threads related to the framing of disability and AT, positioning of seniors with vision loss, and the ideals and occupations to be attained through AT, and point to the importance of re-configuring discourses addressing AT for seniors with vision loss to expand occupational possibilities and embrace collaborative design approaches.

Assistive technology for children and young people with low vision

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Thomas ◽  
Annegret Dahlmann-Noor ◽  
Lucy Barker ◽  
Gary Rubin
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Assistive Technology ◽  
Low Vision ◽  
Children And Young People
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