Digital and tactile drawing-system for blind users

Abstract

In my PhD-Task I want to allow blind users to create digital drawings on their own and, in particular, support tactile drawing by fingers. As the common mechanisms for creating tactile graphics by blind people are analog or text-based methods, editing graphics is a hard or nearly impossible task. I want to build a system that allows a blind user to create tactile graphics with intuitive interaction methods, such as drawing with the fingers, drawing with a pen as well as using stamps and tangibles. Technically this can be realized with a digitalization pen, a standard consumer time of flight (TOF) camera system for input and a two-dimensional touch-sensitive tactile pin-matrix device for output. With this system blind users will get for the first time the freedom of their own digital pictorial expression with all the benefits of digital drawing tools that visual users have for several decades.