Tangible Newspaper for the Visually Impaired Users

This paper outlines a novel interaction technique allowing the visually impaired users to examine the layout of complex paper documents (e.g. a newspaper page). The document is placed on a desk in the view of a camera placed above it. The tip of user's index finger is tracked by means of algorithms of computer vision. As the user moves the finger over the document, the layout of its logical units (articles) is revealed by means of a simple sonification of their boundaries and the speech synthesis. In the paper, implementation of the test application is described and evaluated. The main advantage of our system is the direct mapping of the kinaesthetic experience to the layout of the physical document, enabling the user to employ any strategy to traverse the document. The prototype has been implemented using the ARToolKit library.