Accessibility for Meeting Rooms for Visually Impaired People

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Participation of visually impaired users in co-located teamwork sessions is impeded by inaccessible modalities, such as non-verbal communication and analog visual representations of artifacts. This problem is aggravated if relevant objects are spatially distributed on or above a table – be it an interactive surface or not – or in a room.In this project we propose to research support for visually impaired users to participate in and contribute to meetings more equally, by answering the following research questions with ICT centered approaches:• What to Capture? – Identifying, prioritizing, and analyzing inaccessible modalities of importance.• How to Capture and Pre-Process? – Generating an abstract and processable internal representation of important modalities.• How to Make Sense? – Conceptualizing and realizing the reasoning necessary for interpreting the processable representation. • How to Render? – Presenting the interpreted information via accessible modalities, specifically: established modalities, e.g. Braille and speech and innovative means of representation, e.g. tangibles.• How to Manipulate? – Providing interfaces for a more autonomous and seamless participation, via: established modalities, e.g. keyboard and automatic speech recognition and innovative modalities, e.g. tangibles and head-tracking.The project will lead to a thorough systematic understanding of inaccessible modalities – employed on-surface, above-surface and in-room. It will deliver concepts for processing the information handled using these modalities, for rendering it and making it usable via accessible modalities. This will lead to a considerably more seamless and equal participation of visually impaired users in collaborative, co-located teamwork sessions with sighted participants.