People with visual impairments or blindness (VIB) encounter diffculties in exploring graphical representations that are widely used for the study of STEM subjects. In particular, graphs are used to represent many different scientifc notations: fowcharts, automata, cognitive maps, and more. Among these, structural chemical formulae are characterized by a complex, often 3-dimensional structure, which makes them hard to access and author with traditional assistive tools. We propose µGraph, a multimodal system that combines haptic and speech feedback to enable people with VIB to explore and edit structural chemical formulae. Two main contributions are presented: (i) a novel, non-visual interaction paradigm for exploring graphs and its implementation in the µGraph system, and (ii) an extensive evaluation of the proposed system with 10 participants with VIB showing that µGraph is thoroughly accessible and that the haptic feedback enhances understanding of the geometric properties of a graph.

μGraph: Haptic Exploration and Editing of 3D Chemical Diagrams / C. Bernareggi, D. Ahmetovic, S. Mascetti - In: ASSETS '19 : proceeding[s.l] : ACM, 2019. - ISBN 9781450366762. - pp. 312-317 (( Intervento presentato al 21. convegno International ACM SIGACCESS tenutosi a Pittsburgh nel 2019.

μGraph: Haptic Exploration and Editing of 3D Chemical Diagrams

C. Bernareggi
Primo
;
D. Ahmetovic
Secondo
;
S. Mascetti
Ultimo
2019

Abstract

People with visual impairments or blindness (VIB) encounter diffculties in exploring graphical representations that are widely used for the study of STEM subjects. In particular, graphs are used to represent many different scientifc notations: fowcharts, automata, cognitive maps, and more. Among these, structural chemical formulae are characterized by a complex, often 3-dimensional structure, which makes them hard to access and author with traditional assistive tools. We propose µGraph, a multimodal system that combines haptic and speech feedback to enable people with VIB to explore and edit structural chemical formulae. Two main contributions are presented: (i) a novel, non-visual interaction paradigm for exploring graphs and its implementation in the µGraph system, and (ii) an extensive evaluation of the proposed system with 10 participants with VIB showing that µGraph is thoroughly accessible and that the haptic feedback enhances understanding of the geometric properties of a graph.
STEM education; visual impairment; graph accessibility
Settore INF/01 - Informatica
2019
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/2434/687684
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