Shaowei Chu, Keying Zhu, Journal of Information Processing Systems Vol. 14, No. 5, pp. 1102-1113, Oct. 2018  

https://doi.org/10.3745/JIPS.02.0093
Keywords: Blind Use, Mobile Accessibility, Tactile Reading, User Study, Vibrotactile Interface
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Abstract

Vibrotactile feedback is widely used in designing non-visual interactions on mobile phones, such as message notification, non-visual reading, and blind use. In this work, novel vibrotactile codes are presented to implement a non-visual text reading system for mobile phones. The 26 letters of the English alphabet are formed in an index table with four rows and seven columns, and each letter is mapped using the codes of vibrations. Two kinds of vibrotactile codes are designed with the actuator’s on and off states and with specific lengths (short and long) assigned to each state. To improve the efficiency of tactile perception and user satisfaction, three user experiments are conducted. The first experiment explores the maximum number of continuous vibrations and minimum vibration time of the actuator’s on and off states that the human can perceive. The second experiment determines the minimum interval between continuous vibrations. The vibrotactile reading system is designed and evaluated in the third experiment according to the results of the two preceding experiments. Results show that the character reading accuracy reaches 91.7% and the character reading speed is approximately 617.8 ms. Our method has better reading efficiency and is easier to learn than the traditional Braille coding method.

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