Processing of the found points to get the lines and columns in the text, what we call the Braille mesh determination. This works relates the principles of an optical character recognizer (O.C.R.) for the Braille Code (the kind of writing used by blind people). We developed this system sponsored by the O.N.C.E. (National Organization of Spanish Blind People). The final program runs in the Window...

Certec has been working on touch interfaces – haptic interfaces – since 1995, exploring the possibilities they can offer people with different kinds of disabilities. With a haptic computer interface a blind person can learn mathematics by tracing touchable mathematical curves, playing haptic computer games, and gaining better access to graphical user interfaces like Windows. This paper presents...

UNLABELLED Hearing has an important role in human development and social adaptation in blind people. OBJECTIVE To evaluate the performance of temporal auditory processing in blind people; to characterize the temporal resolution ability; to characterize the temporal ordinance ability and to compare the performance of the study population in the applied tests. METHODS Fifteen blind adults par...

For blind and visually impaired people is quite impossible to be autonomous in the contemporary world, in which we are completely surrounded by information, but only visual information... When looking for a product in shops, or ordering at the restaurant, or when they want to listen to the music on a CD, blind persons encounter the visual barrier of the written language, that only the help of a...

We studied whether default functionality of the human brain, as revealed by task-independent decreases in activity occurring during goal-directed behaviors, is functionally reorganized by blindness. Three groups of otherwise normal adults were studied: early blind, adventitiously blind, and normally sighted. They were imaged by using functional MRI during performance of a word association task ...

The advancement in computer based accessible systems has opened up many avenues for the visually impaired across a wide majority of the globe. Audio feedback based virtual environment like, the screen readers have helped blind people to access internet applications immensely. However, a large section of visually impaired people in different countries, in particular, the Indian sub-continent cou...

As people store more personal data in their smartphones, the consequences of having it stolen or lost become an increasing concern. A typical counter-measure to avoid this risk is to set up a secret code that has to be entered to unlock the device after a period of inactivity. However, for blind users, PINs and passwords are inadequate, since entry 1) consumes a non-trivial amount of time, e.g....

Losses from the proton and antiproton beams of the Fermilab Tevatron have been shown to produce a halo which contribute to backgrounds to physics signals in the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF). To provide a measure of the beam halo and losses, we have installed arrays of scintillation counters on both sides of the CDF detector. We describe here the physical configuration of these counters, ...

Direction of gaze (eye angle + head angle) has been shown to be important for representing space for action, implying a crucial role of vision for spatial updating. However, blind people have no access to vision yet are able to perform goal-directed actions successfully. Here, we investigated the role of visual experience for localizing and updating targets as a function of intervening gaze shi...

This paper describes the development and evaluation of a haptic interface designed to provide access to line graphs for bind or visually impaired people. Computer-generated line graphs can be felt by users through the sense of touch produced by a PHANToM force feedback device. Experiments have been conducted to test the effectiveness of this interface with both sighted and blind people. The res...