Investigation of figure recognition with touch panel of visually impaired people from the perspective of braille proficiency

Protecting the lives and the rights of the impaired people and having them able to participate more in society is an important subject we have to work on. Especially for visually impaired people, we need to support their mobility in order for them to have more opportunity in social participation. To support their mobility, map usage and route recognition are indispensable. So we have been working on developing a method which visually impaired people can intuitively recognize the universally designed interactive map and have come up with a method called the "One Octave Scale Interface (abbr. OOSI)". The method is presented with using sounds and touch panels which are recently seen in PCs and smart-phones. So we confirmed the effectiveness by conducting an experiment on recognizing the figure and walking the route guide map; however, less design criteria of figure and map in OOSI. To improve OOSI, design criteria for applying interaction map and graph is important. In this paper, we propose three design criteria for OOSI to improve figure recognition of visually impaired people. Eleven visually impaired people who use braille participate in experiments on recognizing the figure and the evaluation results have shown the relation between the braille proficiency and the spatial recognition.