SBIR Phase II: Development of a Multimodal Interface for improving independence of Blind and Visually-Impaired people

这项小型企业创新研究（SBIR）第二期项目将为盲人和视障人士开发一种新技术，让他们使用触摸屏设备并探索定量数据，从而产生更广泛的影响和商业潜力。目前，2.85亿英属维尔京群岛个人及其支持网络还没有商业解决方案来访问文本和图形材料。拟议的项目将推进将图形和文本信息转换为英属维尔京群岛用户探索和利用的形式的软件。这将带来更好的教育和工作机会，以及更大的独立性。这项小型企业创新研究（SBIR）的第二阶段工作继续开发一种新型的基于触摸屏的信息访问软件，提供数字媒体中文本和图形信息的多感官表示。条形图等图形工具可以有效地传达信息，但英属维尔京群岛用户无法利用这些方法来综合数据。本项目开发人工智能（AI）框架，以支持视觉图形到多感官图形的自动转换，并演示其实用性。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。

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will develop a new technology for blind and visually-impaired (BVI) people to use touchscreen devices and explore quantitative data. Currently there are no commercial solutions for the 285 million BVI individuals and their support networks to access text and graphical materials. The proposed project will advance software that converts graphical and text information into a form for BVI users to explore and utilize. This will enable greater education and work opportunities as well as greater independence.This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II effort continues development of a novel touchscreen-based information access software offering multisensory representations of both text and graphical information in digital media. Information can be efficiently conveyed with graphical tools such as bar graphs, but BVI users cannot exploit these methods to synthesize data. This project develops the artificial intelligence (AI) framework to support automatic conversion of visual graphics into multisensory graphics and demonstrates its utility.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.