Mustapha Mojahid

Accessibility for the blind: An automated audio/tactile description of pictures in digital documents

In this paper we present our work in the field of accessibility to visual information in digital documents for the blind people. Our method consists in detecting the significant visual information in a picture/document, extracting their properties and rearrange them for the specified accessible output. Our approach relies on the efforts made in the field of digital documents accessibility along with image processing and content-based image retrieval. Our system provides then two possibilities of outputs: tactile/oral or a combination of the two.

Improving the accessibility of digital documents for blind users: contributions of the textual architecture model

This paper presents a framework which aims at describing text formatting, based on a model coming from the field of logic and linguistics, the Textual Architecture Model [23]. The goal is to improve documents accessibility for blind users. The project will later focus on evaluating the efficiency of different navigation and content presentation strategies, based on this framework.

SmartKey: a multi purpose target expansion based virtual keyboard

SmartKey is a new virtual keyboard animation for handheld devices designed to make key selection easier for people with situational and motor impairments. The nearest key to cursor expands in four directions using the available space of nearby keys. Target expansion is accomplished with an occlusion factor of 0% and without any sideways motion. The two studies conducted with able-bodied and motor-impaired users showed that subjects performed better with SmartKey than with traditional virtual keyboard.

GrooveWrite: A Multi-purpose Stylus-Based Text Entry Method

With the emergence of mobile computing devices such as Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), a new challenge to design methods of interacting with them for people with disabilities has been created. In this paper, we propose GrooveWrite as a novel text entry system for handheld devices equipped with touch screen and stylus, targeted at people with situational and motor impairments. Based on traditional seven-segment layout, GrooveWrite interface is designed and implemented. The characters are entered by moving the stylus inside physical side-grooves, which are used as a stabilizer for stylus motion, and crossing the subset of segments that forms intended character. Character recognition neither considers the path of movement, nor recognition pattern, but only the subset of seven segments that is crossed. We examine our system theoretically using CLC model. This study shows that GrooveWrite text entry speed will be 24.78 words per minute.

Adaptation of AAC to the context communication: a real improvement for the user illustration through the VITIPI word completion

This paper describes the performance of the VITIPI word completion system through a text input simulation. The aim of this simulation is to estimate the impact of the linguistic knowledge base size through two metrics: the Key-Stroke Ratio (KSR) and the KeyStroke Per Character (KPC). Our study shows that the performance of a word completion is depending of the % of words not available and the size of the lexicon.

READ: A (Research) Platform for Evaluating Non-visual Access Methods to Digital Documents

READ (which stands for Documents Architecture REstitution, in French), is a software allowing augmented access of tagged documents content. It was originally developed for a project aiming at evaluating informational and functional equivalents to text visual formatting and was very recently tested in a user study (results unpublished yet). The design flexibility of this platform allows an easy implementation of input and output modalities, as well as navigation functions. We wish to publish this application for noncommercial reuse in the short run; the main goal is here to easily allow researchers to evaluate non-visual access methods to documents, since current assistive technologies are known to raise multiple issues. A live demonstration of READ will enable attendees to experience the implemented output modalities and navigation functions, as well as the platform configuration and extension potential.

Communicating Text Structure to Blind People with Text-to-Speech

This paper presents the results of an experiment conducted with nine blind subjects for the evaluation of two audio restitution methods for headings, using Text-To-Speech. We used specialized audio and two voices to demarcate headings. This work is part of a research project which focuses on structural in-formation accessibility for the blind in digital documents.

3DKey: An Accordion-Folding Based Virtual Keyboard for Small Screen

Nowadays, handheld devices are more and more equipped with functionalities and applications so that they almost serve like a desktop computer. However users find them tedious and tiring to input text due the tiny keys of their virtual keyboard. In this paper, we discuss a new text entry method (3DKey) based on addition of a third dimension to traditional virtual keyboard to overcome the small screen constraint of handheld devices. In this context, the accordion-folding the virtual keyboard is used as a solution to expand keys leading to easier selection. Thus our 3DKey virtual keyboard can be seen as composed of two zones: an accordion-folded zone and a spread zone. Our study showed that users achieved more accurate and relatively faster text entry with 120° accordion-folding and predictive spreading virtual keyboard, which resulted in speed improvement of 37.71 %, than with traditional virtual keyboard.

Seven-segment input 7SI: evaluation expérimentale dans des situations dégradées de mobilité

This article briefly presents our new gestural system for mobile text entry, called Seven-Segment Input 7SI. It is based on crossing character glyphs, and giving an intuitive representation of letters and numbers through a basic configuration of seven segments. We describe an experimental evaluation of 7SI system, conducted in two different contexts: desktop and mobility. The first results show that user achieved an input rate of 20.09 WPM. Moreover, 7SI system is natural and easy to learn, subject accomplished all of the testing sessions without needing the character chart.