CAREER: Making Digital Imagery Accessible to Blind and Low-Vision Users via Audiohaptic Dioramas

盲人和弱视人群在很大程度上被排除在电脑的视觉体验之外，影响了日常生活的许多方面，如导航、购物、阅读新闻和与朋友保持联系。目前，计算机通过简单的文字描述向盲人用户传递图像，这使得用户无法形成自己的解释。该项目旨在通过引入听觉立体模型的概念来提高盲人的生活质量，通过触摸探索物体的三维结构，收集物体的深度、形状和材料等物理细节，使用户能够以类似于现实生活的方式了解事物的样子。听觉触觉立体模型将与日常触摸屏一起工作，允许盲人用户触摸或指向图像，并通过直观的音频和触觉线索感知其物理细节。这项技术将使盲人更容易接触图像、电影、视频游戏、虚拟现实和网络。研究人员将与领先的科技公司合作，在主流消费者应用程序上提供听觉立体模型。该项目的教育部分将通过用听觉立体模型补充印刷图像，使盲人学生能够使用K-12教科书。它还将培养盲人学生成为技术设计师，这是一个没有视力很难进入的领域，促进未来使技术更具包容性的努力。这个研究项目推进了可访问性研究中一个长达数十年的问题：了解如何使盲人用户同样可以访问图像。通过听觉触觉立体模型的概念，这项研究将有助于通过声音和触觉以一种与日常触摸屏设备兼容的方式传达三维场景的物理细节。该研究项目将遵循以用户为中心的设计和评估过程，以确保满足盲人用户的需求，涉及盲人社区和实验室成员，并与盲人服务组织合作。该项目将带来几项科学贡献：(1)当用户在触摸屏上探索静态图像时，通过每个像素的声音和触觉直观地传达静态图像的深度，形状，材料和颜色的框架；(2)使盲人能够独立完成日常视觉任务的技术，如导航、寻找建筑物入口或使用智能手机相机或智能眼镜找到特定颜色的衬衫；(3)使盲人从视频游戏和虚拟现实中可视化交互式虚拟环境的技术。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Blind and low-vision people are largely left out of visual experiences on computers, affecting many aspects of daily life such as navigating, shopping, reading the news, and staying in touch with friends. Computers currently convey images to blind users via simple text descriptions, which does not allow users to form their own interpretations. This project seeks to enhance the quality of life for blind people by introducing the concept of audiohaptic dioramas, which allows users to learn what things look like in a way similar to real life: by exploring objects' three-dimensional structure via touch, gleaning physical details such as depth, shape, and material. Audiohaptic dioramas will work with everyday touchscreens, allowing blind users to touch or point at an image and sense its physical details via intuitive audio and haptic cues. This technology will give blind people greater access to images, films, video games, virtual reality, and the Web. The investigator will partner with leading technology companies to make audiohaptic dioramas available on mainstream consumer apps. The project's educational component will make K-12 textbooks accessible to blind students by supplementing printed images with audiohaptic dioramas. It will also train blind students to become technology designers, a field hard to enter without sight, catalyzing future efforts to make technology more inclusive.This research program advances a decades-long problem in accessibility research: understanding how to make images equivalently accessible to blind users. Through the concept of audiohaptic dioramas, this research will contribute the first techniques for conveying physical details of three-dimensional scenes via sound and haptics in a way that is compatible with everyday touchscreen devices. The research program will follow a user-centered design and evaluation process to ensure that blind users’ needs are met, involving blind community and lab members throughout and partnering with blind-serving organizations. This project will lead to several scientific contributions: (1) a framework for conveying still images’ depth, shape, material, and color intuitively via sound and haptics on a per-pixel basis as users explore them on a touchscreen; (2) techniques for enabling blind people to independently perform everyday visual tasks such as navigation, finding a building entrance, or finding a specific color shirt using their smartphone camera or smartglasses; and (3) techniques for enabling blind people to visualize interactive virtual environments from video games and virtual reality.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.