Arabic Braille Touch Keyboard for Android Users

2014 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 54-71 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nabil Hewahi ◽  
Ghadeer Abu-Shaban ◽  
Esraa El-Ashqer ◽  
Ayat Abu-Noqaira ◽  
Nour El-Wadiya
Keyword(s):  
Visually Impaired ◽  
Smart Phone ◽  
Touch Screen ◽  
Arabic Language ◽  
Tactile Feedback ◽  
Smart Phones ◽  
Special Equipment ◽  
Visually Impaired People ◽  
Impaired People ◽  
Touch Screen Devices

As smart phones appeared with their elegant, easy and exciting touch functionality, the use of touch screen devices has been spreading very fast. Beside the previous advantages, smart phones addresses some new challenges for people with disabilities. Most of visually impaired people don't prefer using touch-screen devices, as these lack the tactile feedback and are visually demanding. However, there have been some solutions to come over these problems, but they were not enough. Some of these solutions is to connect a special equipment to a smart phone to allow the visually impaired user to enter the required input. Other applications help visually impaired people to use the smart phones and read whatever on the screen by hovering their finger tips on the text. Visually impaired people who use smart phones have to memorize QWERTY keyboard which have a large number of targets with small locations specified for each target which will lead to a high proportion of error occurrence. In this paper, the authors propose ABTKA- Arabic Braille Touch Keyboard for Android Users. This application is the first application for Arabic language that uses Braille language for visually impaired who are using smart phones or intended to do so. ABTKA facilitates text-entry functionality by supporting Braille writing on touch screens. The used approach in the proposed system can be easily adapted to other languages. The main advantages of the used approach are that it does not need any extra equipment to be connected to the smart phone; it is dynamic (no fixed positions for the touch points), simple to use, one entry for each character, supported by voice and respond promptly to the input. ABTKA involves various algorithms to achieve its objectives. It starts with entering the user standard locations of finger tips, then the user can enter any Braille character which has to be reindexed to be in the same order of Perkins Brailler's buttons. Any inserted character is converted to Arabic character. Any converted character will have a voice feedback. Words and full sentences will also have voice feedback. ABTKA has been tested by various visually impaired people and proved that it is easy to learn and simple to use.

MAGIC-I as Assistance for the Visually Impaired People

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kavita Pandey ◽  
Dhiraj Pandey ◽  
Vatsalya Yadav ◽  
Shriya Vikhram
Keyword(s):  
Visually Impaired ◽  
Smart Phone ◽  
Emergency Situation ◽  
Daily Activities ◽  
Daily Life Activities ◽  
Best Friends ◽  
Visually Impaired People ◽  
The World ◽  
Impaired People ◽  
Impaired User

Background: According to the WHO report, around 4.07% of the world's population is visually impaired. About 90% of the visually impaired users live in the lower economic strata. In the fast moving technology, most of the invention misses the need of these people. Mainly the technologies were designed for mainstream people; visually impaired people always find an inability to access it. This inability arises primarily for reasons such as cost, for example, Perkins Brailler costs 80-248 dollars for the simple purpose of Braille input. Another major reason is the hassle of carrying the big equipment. Objective: Keeping all this in mind and making technology as their best friends, MAGIC-1 has been designed. The goal is to provide a solution in terms of an application, which helps the visually impaired user in their daily life activities. Method: The proposed solution assists visually impaired users through smart phone technology. If visually impaired users ever wished to have a touched guide into a smart phone, MAGIC-1 has the solution that consolidates all the important features in their daily activities. Results: The performance of the solution as a whole and its individual features in terms of usability, utility and other metrics, etc. has been tested with sample visually impaired users. Moreover, their performances in term of Errors per Word and Words per Minute have been observed. Conclusion: MAGIC-I, the proposed solution works as an assistant of visually impaired users to overcome their daily struggles and stay more connected to the world. A visually impaired user can communicate via their mobile devices with features like eyes free texting using braille, voice calling etc. They can easily take help in an emergency situation with the options of SOS emergency calling and video assistance.

scholarly journals Development of a low-cost senor based aid for visually impaired people

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 727-730
Author(s):  
Nora Loepthien ◽  
Tanja Jehnichen ◽  
Josephine Hauser ◽  
Benjamin Schullcke ◽  
Knut Möller
Keyword(s):  
Learning Process ◽  
Visually Impaired ◽  
Low Cost ◽  
Tactile Feedback ◽  
Economic Aspects ◽  
Visually Impaired People ◽  
Impaired People ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Pass Through

AbstractThe aim of the project is the development of an aid for blind or visually impaired people, considering economic aspects as well as easy adaptability to various daily situations. Distance sensors were attached to a walking frame (rollator) to detect the distance to obstacles. The information from the sensors is transmitted to the user via tactile feedback. This is realized with a number of vibration motors which were located at the upper belly area of the subject. To test the functionality of the aid to the blind, a testing track with obstacles has been passed through by a number of volunteers. While passing the track five times the needed time to pass through, as well as the number of collisions, were noticed. The results showed a decline in the average time needed to pass though the testing track. This indicates a learning process of the operator to interpret the signals given by the tactile feedback.

scholarly journals Using wrist vibrations to guide hand movement and whole body navigation

i-com ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anke Brock ◽  
Slim Kammoun ◽  
Marc Macé ◽  
Christophe Jouffrais
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Environment ◽  
Visually Impaired ◽  
Hand Movement ◽  
Tactile Feedback ◽  
Whole Body ◽  
Blind People ◽  
Wizard Of Oz ◽  
Audio Cues ◽  
Visually Impaired People ◽  
Impaired People

SummaryIn the absence of vision, mobility and orientation are challenging. Audio and tactile feedback can be used to guide visually impaired people. In this paper, we present two complementary studies on the use of vibrational cues for hand guidance during the exploration of itineraries on a map, and whole body-guidance in a virtual environment. Concretely, we designed wearable Arduino bracelets integrating a vibratory motor producing multiple patterns of pulses. In a first study, this bracelet was used for guiding the hand along unknown routes on an interactive tactile map. A wizard-of-Oz study with six blindfolded participants showed that tactons, vibrational patterns, may be more efficient than audio cues for indicating directions. In a second study, this bracelet was used by blindfolded participants to navigate in a virtual environment. The results presented here show that it is possible to significantly decrease travel distance with vibrational cues. To sum up, these preliminary but complementary studies suggest the interest of vibrational feedback in assistive technology for mobility and orientation for blind people.

scholarly journals Interactive Sound Generation to Aid Visually Impaired People via Object Detection Using Touch Screen Sensor

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (11) ◽  
pp. 4057
Author(s):  
Tias Kurniati ◽  
Chuan-Kai Yang ◽  
Tzer-Shyong Chen ◽  
Yu-Fang Chung ◽  
Yu-Min Huang ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Object Detection ◽  
Visually Impaired ◽  
Touch Screen ◽  
Sound Generation ◽  
Visually Impaired People ◽  
Impaired People

scholarly journals Analysis and Evaluation of Braille to Text Conversion Methods

2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Sana Shokat ◽  
Rabia Riaz ◽  
Sanam Shahla Rizvi ◽  
Khalil Khan ◽  
Farina Riaz ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Visually Impaired ◽  
Touch Screen ◽  
Future Research ◽  
User Input ◽  
Analysis And Evaluation ◽  
Visually Impaired People ◽  
Impaired People ◽  
Comprehensive Survey ◽  
Language Conversion ◽  
Visually Impaired Persons

Technology is advancing rapidly in present times. To serve as a useful and connected part of the community, everyone is required to learn and update themselves on innovations. Visually impaired people fall behind in this regard because of their inherent limitations. To involve these people as active participants within communities, technology must be modified for their facilitation. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of various user input schemes designed for the visually impaired for Braille to natural language conversion. These techniques are analyzed in detail with a focus on their accessibility and usability. Currently, considerable effort has been made to design a touch-screen input mechanism for visually impaired people, such as Braille Touch, Braille Enter, and Edge Braille. All of these schemes use location-specific input and challenge visually impaired persons to locate specified places on the touch screen. Most of the schemes require special actions to switch between upper and lowercase and between numbers and special characters, which affects system usability. The key features used for accessing the performance of these techniques are efficiency, accuracy, and usability issues found in the applications. In the end, a comparison of all these techniques is performed. Outcomes of this analysis show that there is a strong need for application that put the least burden on the visually impaired users. Based on this survey, a guideline has been designed for future research in this area.

Indoor navigation with smart phone IMU for the visually impaired in university buildings

2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 133-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesus Victor Zegarra Flores ◽  
Laurence Rasseneur ◽  
Rodrigue Galani ◽  
Fabienne Rakitic ◽  
René Farcy
Keyword(s):  
Visually Impaired ◽  
Smart Phone ◽  
Indoor Navigation ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Final Destination ◽  
The North ◽  
Visually Impaired People ◽  
Impaired People ◽  
Impaired Person ◽  
Partially Sighted

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to design and test effective indoor navigation solutions for visually impaired people in situations where GPS, bluetooth or Wi-Fi signals are unavailable. The authors use the inertial measurement units (IMU), the compass and the barometer of a smart phone. Design/methodology/approach The authors have used commercial Android smart phones with IMU, compass and barometer to record a path and to give navigation instructions in an adapted way using a mobility-specific vocabulary. The method proposed is to save paths taking into account different indoor waypoints such as the stairs (change from one floor to another) and the change of direction of the trajectory of the path (e.g. one-fourth turn right or left), recording data from the IMU sensor’s, compass and barometer of the smart phone. Having this information and the characteristics of the each segment (distance, azimuth to the north and pressure) of the path, it is possible to provide functional navigation guidance to the visually impaired subject. Three different visually impaired people (one partially sighted and two fully blind) and three sighted people have tested the paths. The efficiency of the navigation is analyzed in terms of distance and time using the comparison between blind and sighted people. Findings The main finding is that it is possible to guide visually impaired people some hundreds of meters just using the sensors of a smart phone under certain conditions: the visually impaired person has to understand the guidance instructions and respect some strategies (e.g. not to walk diagonally across vast spaces). Additionally it is observed that the visually impaired participants walked distances, which are not much different to the optimal values. On the other hand; because of their hesitations using their white cane to find free paths, they take in some cases 50 percent more time to arrive (for a few minutes path, this time is not critical and even more efficient than looking for a guide). One thing to highlight is that even with this hesitation, the subjects arrived to the final destination. Originality/value This paper demonstrates how an IMU coupled to a compass and a barometer from a Smart Phone employing a spoken mobility language (e.g. next corridor to the left; at the end of the stairs turn right, turn left, etc.) can guide visually impaired people inside buildings.

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