Personal mobile controller for blind people

ABSTRACT

We are moving towards a future where people will be ever more surrounded by technology and multiple appliances, bringing about the promise of truly intelligent environments. However, this multitude of devices raises several issues to HCI practitioners. Indeed, our preliminary studies confirm that blind people experience difficulties with most appliances, due to inadequate interfaces. The research described here approaches this problem by moving the user interface away from appliances to an intermediary device, which blind people are familiar with and can fully control. Additionally, we propose an automatic generation algorithm, which provides a consistent user interface to all appliances in the environment.

References

1. Emiliani, L. and Stephanidis, C. 2005. Universal access to ambient intelligence environments: Opportunities and challenges for people with disabilities. In IBM Systems Journal No. 3, 605--619.
2. Nichols, J. and Myers, B.A. and Rothrock, B. 2006. UNIFORM: automatically generating consistent remote control user interfaces. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI. ACM Press, 611--620.
3. Nunes, R. 2003. DomoBus - A New Approach to Home Automation, In Proceedings of the 8th International Congress on Electric Engineering, Portuga

Index Terms

• Human-centered computing

  • Interaction design

    • Interaction design process and methods

      • Interface design prototyping