Kathy Blashki

Supporting the creative drive: investigating paralinguistic voice as a mode of interaction for artists with upper limb disabilities

For people with upper limb disabilities visual art is an important activity that allows for expression of individuality and independence. They show remarkable endurance, patience and determination to adapt their remaining capabilities to create visual art. There are significant advantages of digital technologies in assisting artists with upper limb disabilities. Paralinguistic voice recognition technologies have proven to be a particularly promising mode of interaction. Despite these benefits, technological support for people with upper limb disabilities to create visual art is scarce. This paper reports on a number of case studies of several artists with upper limb disabilities. These case studies illustrate the struggles they face to be creative and also show the significant advantages of digital technologies in assisting such artists. An investigation into people’s ability to use the volume of their voice to control cursor movement to create drawings on the screen is also reported. With motivation, training and practise, use of volume to control drawing tasks shows great promise. It is believed that paralinguistic voice has wider implications beyond assisting artists with upper limb disabilities, such as: an alternative mode of interaction for disabled people to perform tasks other than creating visual art, alternative mode of interaction for hands busy environments and as a voice training system for people with speech impairments.

The drive to create: an investigation of tools to support disabled artists

For people with upper limb disabilities visual art is an important activity that allows for expression of individuality and independence. Through a series of case studies we illustrate the struggles faced by people with upper limb disabilities to be creative. They show remarkable endurance, patience and determination to adapt their remaining capabilities to create visual art. The case studies also show the significant advantages of digital technologies in assisting artists with upper limb disabilities. We discuss the implication of alternative and/or multimodal interactions as possible assistive technologies for creating visual art. A prototype is under development to investigate the possibilities of paralinguistic voice as a mode of creating visual art.

Voice art: a novel mode for creating visual art

In this paper, we report on our investigation into peoples ability to use the volume of their voice to create digital drawings. This is especially hopeful for artists with upper limb disabilities who show remarkable endurance, patience and determination to create art with whatever means available to them. We developed a prototype voice art system to investigate the potential of this form of interaction. Our first experiment showed that varying the volume of the voice is both comfortable and intuitive. However, it was ascertained the instant usability of volume based control is better suited for target acquisition tasks as opposed to drawing tasks. Nevertheless, the results indicate the potential learnability of volume control for drawing. A second experiment investigated the long-term learnability of this form of interaction. The results show that drawing using voice volume control is a skill that can be developed with time. We believe that voice volume control has implications beyond assisting artists with upper limb disabilities. Such possible implications may be: an alternative mode of interaction for disabled people to perform tasks other than creating visual art; for people whose hands are busy elsewhere; and as a voice training system for people with speech impairments.

Preattentive processing: using low-level vision psychology to encode information in visualisations

This paper explores the effects of two preattentive visual features, closure and depth, when performing the preattentive task of boundary detection. Testing was performed on human subjects and the data was collected using a preattentive perception experiment. The post experimental questionnaire allowed subjects to indicate their estimate of the usefulness of each preattentive visual feature. The results indicate that both depth and closure are effective when performing boundary detection task. However, depth proved to be a more dominant than closure.