Touch for Accessibility: Haptic SVG Diagrams for Visually Impaired and Blind Individuals

Sara Alzalabny, Omar Moured, Karin Müller, Thorsten Schwarz, Bastian E. Rapp, Rainer Stiefelhagen

Abstract: Making technical diagrams accessible for individuals who are blind or visually impaired (BVI) continues to pose a challenge. Numerous researchers have explored the potential of utilizing vector graphics to improve the accessibility of such diagrams. Vector graphics offer many advantages due to their ability to scale without loss of information and their capacity to store shapes and metadata in a structured manner. This paper presents a new tactile interface designed to transform technical diagrams in Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format into a tactile format. The interface allows BVI individuals to explore technical diagrams more effectively by utilizing haptic interactions on 2D refreshable tactile displays. Through a formal user study with five blind participants, we show that most participants could effectively understand and interact with the diagrams using the proposed interface and interactions. Furthermore, all the participants preferred the proposed approach over existing methods, such as textual descriptions and embossed tactile papers. For more information and demos, please visit our project’s webpage https://moured.github.io/touch4accessibility/