TRANSACTIONS ON REHABILITATION ENGINEERING 1 Automatic Visual to Tactile Translation , Part II : Evaluation of the TACTile Image Creation

| This is the second part of a two-part paper that develops a method for the automatic conversion of images from visual to tactile form. In Part I, a variety of topics were reviewed including issues in human factors, access technology for tactile graphics production, and image processing. In this part, the material presented in the rst part is used to motivate, develop and support the methods used in the development of a prototype visual-to-tactile translator called the TACTile Image Creation System (TACTICS). The speciic choices made in the design of the system are discussed and justiied, including selection of software platform , tactile output format, tactile image creation procedure , aggregate image processing sequences used, and principles from the discipline of psychophysics. The results of four experiments on tactile image discrimination, identii-cation and comprehension are reported and discussed, and future directions in this area are proposed.