A New 3D Interaction Technique Accessible to the Visually Impaired

Currently in Brazil, approximately 19% of the population has some type of visual impairment. Worldwide it is estimated that there are 285 million disabled people. With the advent of technology, three-dimensional (3D) virtual environments are increasingly being used in several applications. Many of these applications, however, are not accessible to visually impaired users, creating a digital divide. The purpose of this paper is to develop a new 3D interaction technique accessible to visually impaired users at low cost. Some tests are performed to investigate the prototype´s functionality while a more complete test protocol is being developed and submitted to the ethics committee (CEP) in order to perform tests with visually impaired users, since the results of the functional tests described here are encouraging.