Haptic Cues for Vision Impaired Art Makers: "Seeing" through Touch

For able-bodied people within the art and design discipline, access to Computer Aided Design (CAD) and visual graphic interface is a well-defined iterative process. However for non-sighted people or people with impaired vision, this is a difficult process to facilitate. Often this issue excludes and/or limits access for people with vision impairments to fully utilise CAD systems, web interface, and any other visually led interface which mainly communicates through graphical or pictorial cues and image-based metaphors. This paper presents an ongoing inclusively designed multimodal system. Whereby the use of digitally adapted haptic technology is explored via a clinically established and valid fine motor skills test: ´Wade´s Nine-Hole-Peg-Test´ (NHPT). Particular attention is paid to assess whether non-sighted participants can gain a level of speed and efficacy of NHPT task by using the haptic technology together with their own tacit haptic perceptions compared to a subject group of healthy sighted participants. The results indicate better performance of non-sighted participants when compared to the sighted, while also showing that implemented multimodal cues assist the performance of both participant groups based on insertion time. Given these results, future work will focus on analysing collision data from haptic insertion of the pegs in holes to compare performance based on recorded error. Additionally, these findings will be used towards providing tools for more inclusive interfaces to be used in pedagogic practices.