Ambient Intelligence System Enabling People With Blindness to Develop Electrotechnical Components and Their Drivers

Abstract

Along with the development of new assistive technologies, including ambient intelligence (AmI) environments, new job opportunities are created for people with blindness or visual impairment. Whereas research on software development for people with blindness has been conducted since the 1960s, the design and development of electrotechnical equipment still lacks any way to compensate for the disability which would enable people with blindness to perform even the activities pertaining to this field. This article aims to introduce these new technological procedures enabling the compensation of the disability of people with blindness when designing and developing electrotechnical components (or prototypes) and their drivers by using the AmI system RUDO modules and other tools. This includes the modules enabling measuring electrotechnical quantities, tracing of oscilloscope curves, and ensuring a unified user interface for programming and operation of the devices connected. Other approaches are introduced herein that focused on the production of mechanical components for device construction. This article also contains an illustrative video of practical use of these technological procedures by a person with blindness. To assess the usability of the designed technological procedures to the work of a designer with blindness and one without visual impairment, the cognitive walkthrough method was used. The main contribution of this article is to broaden the knowledge base by the principles of involving people with blindness in the development and construction of electrotechnical components (or prototypes). These new possibilities can be used practically, for instance, in computer education, which can offer new curricula for visually impaired students and focused on more practical issues where hardware and software approaches meet.