Haptic Feedback to Assist Blind People in Indoor Environment Using Vibration Patterns

Feedback is one of the significant factors for the mental mapping of an environment. It is the communication of spatial information to blind people to perceive the surroundings. The assistive smartphone technologies deliver feedback for different activities using several feedback mediums, including voice, sonification and vibration. Researchers 0have proposed various solutions for conveying feedback messages to blind people using these mediums. Voice and sonification feedback are effective solutions to convey information. However, these solutions are not applicable in a noisy environment and may occupy the most important auditory sense. The privacy of a blind user can also be compromised with speech feedback. The vibration feedback could effectively be used as an alternative approach to these mediums. This paper proposes a real-time feedback system specifically designed for blind people to convey information to them based on vibration patterns. The proposed solution has been evaluated through an empirical study by collecting data from 24 blind people through a mixed-mode survey using a questionnaire. Results show the average recognition accuracy for 10 different vibration patterns are 90%, 82%, 75%, 87%, 65%, and 70%.

Application Mobile Design for Blind People

The team software process is a methodology focused on software development on gears, which at the end of the construction ensures product quality. This quality must be taken into account for people with disabilities like visual impairment. According to World Health Organization, in a study conducted in 2010, the number of people with visual impairment in the world is around 285,389 million people, and in America, it is around 26,612 million. This chapter focuses on using the TSP for the construction of an application for people with visual disabilities, resulting in a quality product that will help in memory and, in addition, the user learns about the city of Aguascalientes, Mexico, allowing the inclusion of these users in society.

Lie Detection and Blindness: Research in Pandemic Times

The aim of this article is to explore the differences in lie detection between sighted and visually impaired people. In the study, three groups of blind and sighted individuals were tested on their lie-detecting abilities during natural everyday communication. Due to the current pandemic situation, the study was conducted in accordance with the sanitary regime, using appropriate methods and tools. The results revealed no statistically significant differences between blind and sighted individuals in the accuracy of lie and truth detection. The groups did not differ in how confident they were in making veracity judgements either. The study shows that visual impairment does not have an impact on lie-detection abilities and that blind people are as good at detecting lies as sighted individuals.

Modified KNN-LVQ for Stairs Down Detection Based on Digital Image

Persons with visual impairments need a tool that can detect obstacles around them. The obstacles that exist can endanger their activities. The obstacle that is quite dangerous for the visually impaired is the stairs down. The stairs down can cause accidents for blind people if they are not aware of their existence. Therefore we need a system that can identify the presence of stairs down. This study uses digital image processing technology in recognizing the stairs down. Digital images are used as input objects which will be extracted using the Gray Level Co-occurrence Matrix method and then classified using the KNN-LVQ hybrid method. The proposed algorithm is tested to determine the accuracy and computational speed obtained. Hybrid KNN-LVQ gets an accuracy of 95%. While the average computing speed obtained is 0.07248 (s).

Countries of the Blind: Blindness and the Creation of Other Worlds in “The Country of the Blind”, “The Black Grippe” and The Day of the Triffids

<p>This thesis examines the depiction of mass blindness in three works: H.G. Wells’s “The Country of the Blind”, Edgar Wallace’s “The Black Grippe” and John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids. In their description of a near-universal impairment, blindness, these texts challenge the typical portrayal of disability in fiction, as an affliction affecting an individual. They reflect how society has been constructed around particular assumptions of ability and how that might be different in another society, be it an isolated village or a world changed by infection or Cold War era weapons. In their depictions of the sighted people in these worlds, they highlight the distinction between disability and impairment, including in one case a sighted man disabled by a society constructed for and by blind people. I place these texts in a context of the time of writing and argue that they themselves give context to more recent discussions of disability – and diversity generally – in speculative fiction. They demonstrate the unique potential of speculative fiction to move beyond an individualised representation of disability by the creation of new worlds.</p>

Countries of the Blind: Blindness and the Creation of Other Worlds in “The Country of the Blind”, “The Black Grippe” and The Day of the Triffids

<p>This thesis examines the depiction of mass blindness in three works: H.G. Wells’s “The Country of the Blind”, Edgar Wallace’s “The Black Grippe” and John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids. In their description of a near-universal impairment, blindness, these texts challenge the typical portrayal of disability in fiction, as an affliction affecting an individual. They reflect how society has been constructed around particular assumptions of ability and how that might be different in another society, be it an isolated village or a world changed by infection or Cold War era weapons. In their depictions of the sighted people in these worlds, they highlight the distinction between disability and impairment, including in one case a sighted man disabled by a society constructed for and by blind people. I place these texts in a context of the time of writing and argue that they themselves give context to more recent discussions of disability – and diversity generally – in speculative fiction. They demonstrate the unique potential of speculative fiction to move beyond an individualised representation of disability by the creation of new worlds.</p>

Refuser d’être l’aveugle des autres Dynamiques et pratiques de l’écriture de soi, à l’encontre des représentations sociales de la cécité

This paper aims at exploring the autobiographical writing of blind, deaf-blind or partially sighted people from a sociopoetical perspective. It contends the following idea: for the authors to be considered, the first-person text opens up a space which allows them to refuse and deconstruct the conception of blindness shared by sighted persons. This literary process, from which the construction of a counter-discourse that can even go as far as subversion emerges, gives the author the opportunity to reappropriate his or her blindness beyond the imaginary, the myths and the fancies deriving from what is commonly understood and depicted as an impairment and a deprivation. Focusing on the fundamental concept of “préjugé de la cécité” (“prejudice of blindness”) developed by the French blind intellectual Pierre Villey, the article shall furthermore demonstrate that this common imaginary and these collective social representations are deeply rooted in culture and literature: They turn out to be an archetype one cannot easily avoid, inhabiting autobiographical texts and taking the form of stereotyped associations. This archetype is nevertheless swiftly challenged and deconstructed by the autobiographer’s writing, therefore leaving room for a representation of blindness from an internal point of view, based on individual experience and nurtured by everyday life. This paper thus argues that autobiographical space and textuality display a discursive power that the author can use as he or she wishes, in order to dismantle stereotypes and transform collective and social representations of blind people and blindness.

Les aveugles dans l’œuvre de Descartes Contestation ou perpétuation des représentations sociales de la cécité ?

This paper examines Descartes's conception of the blind and blindness in the light of the social representations that the philosopher both distanced and requalified. It first shows that Descartes rationalises the representation of the 'blind seer': the philosopher attributes to people who cannot see a form of vision which, unlike the power of divination that the ancient Greeks attributed to certain people, but also the 'inner gaze' typical of the mysticism of the Classical Age, is not in any way supernatural. Descartes thus helps to undo some of the main prejudices that plague blind people. The article goes on to establish that this rationalisation excludes these people from the knowledge that Descartes places in them: the paradoxical knowledge of the process of vision. Finally, it points out that by valuing the sense of sight in a way that perhaps no philosopher had done before him, Descartes also rationalises the predominantly medieval representation of the 'blind ignorant'. The conclusion of the paper is as follows: this double rationalisation produces the ambivalent idea that many people still have of blindness, namely a deficiency that is very poorly compensated for by an ability to see other than with the eyes. By rehabilitating touch, the Enlightenment produced a conception of it that was both rational and in no way deprived.

Ride-Hailing as Accessible Transit

In this chapter, we examine the potential of ride-hailing services to address the transportation challenges of blind people in metropolitan India. Through a qualitative study, which included both interviews and observations, we examined how blind people in metropolitan India used ride-hailing to get around, what they perceived as the benefits of the services, some of the challenges they experienced while using them and how they compared to other modes of transportation (e.g., buses and auto-rickshaws). Finally, we discuss some improvements to enhance the ride-hailing experiences of blind people in India and also highlight the relevance of our findings by situating them in the Indian context.