Enhancing the Travel Experience for People with Visual Impairments through Multimodal Interaction: NaviGPT, A Real-Time AI-Driven Mobile Navigation System.

Assistive technologies for people with visual impairments (PVI) have made significant advancements, particularly with the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and real-time sensor technologies. However, current solutions often require PVI to switch between multiple apps and tools for tasks like image recognition, navigation, and obstacle detection, which can hinder a seamless and efficient user experience. In this paper, we present NaviGPT, a high-fidelity prototype that integrates LiDAR-based obstacle detection, vibration feedback, and large language model (LLM) responses to provide a comprehensive and real-time navigation aid for PVI.

Are Two Heads Better than One? Investigating Remote Sighted Assistance with Paired Volunteers.

Remote Sighted Assistance (RSA) is a popular smartphone-mediated aid for people with blindness, where a sighted individual converses with a blind individual in a one-on-one (1:1) session. Since sighted assistants outnumber blind individuals (13:1), this paper investigates what happens when more than one sighted individual assists a single blind individual in a session. Specifically, we propose paired-volunteer RSA, a new paradigm where two sighted volunteers assist a single user with blindness.

Helping Helpers: Supporting Volunteers in Remote Sighted Assistance with Augmented Reality Maps.

Remote sighted assistance (RSA) has emerged as a conversational assistive service, where remote sighted workers, ., agents, provide real-time assistance to blind users via video-chat-like communication. Prior work identified several challenges for the agents to provide navigational assistance to users and proposed computer vision-mediated RSA service to address those challenges.

Auto-Suggesting Browsing Actions for Personalized Web Screen Reading.

Web browsing has never been easy for blind people, primarily due to the serial press-and-listen interaction mode of screen readers - their "go-to" assistive technology. Even simple navigational browsing actions on a page require a multitude of shortcuts. Auto-suggesting the next browsing action has the potential to assist blind users in swiftly completing various tasks with minimal effort.

Accessible Gesture Typing for Non-Visual Text Entry on Smartphones.

Gesture typing-entering a word by gliding the finger sequentially over letter to letter- has been widely supported on smartphones for sighted users. However, this input paradigm is currently inaccessible to blind users: it is difficult to draw shape gestures on a virtual keyboard without access to key visuals. This paper describes the design of , to bring this input paradigm to blind users.

Write-it-Yourself with the Aid of Smartwatches: A Wizard-of-Oz Experiment with Blind People.

Working with non-digital, standard printed materials has always been a challenge for blind people, especially writing. Blind people very often depend on others to fill out printed forms, write checks, sign receipts and documents. Extant assistive technologies for working with printed material have exclusively focused on reading, with little to no support for writing.

Speed-Dial: A Surrogate Mouse for Non-Visual Web Browsing.

Sighted people can browse the Web almost exclusively using a mouse. This is because web browsing mostly entails pointing and clicking on some element in the web page, and these two operations can be done almost instantaneously with a computer mouse. Unfortunately, people with vision impairments cannot use a mouse as it only provides visual feedback through a cursor.

SteeringWheel: A Locality-Preserving Magnification Interface for Low Vision Web Browsing.

Low-vision users struggle to browse the web with screen magnifiers. Firstly, magnifiers occlude significant portions of the webpage, thereby making it cumbersome to get the webpage overview and quickly locate the desired content. Further, magnification causes loss of spatial locality and visual cues that commonly define semantic relationships in the page; reconstructing semantic relationships exclusively from narrow views dramatically increases the cognitive burden on the users.

Non-visual Web Browsing: Beyond Web Accessibility.

People with vision impairments typically use screen readers to browse the Web. To facilitate non-visual browsing, web sites must be made accessible to screen readers, i.e.

Ubiquitous Accessibility for People with Visual Impairments: Are We There Yet?

Ubiquitous access is an increasingly common vision of computing, wherein users can interact with any computing device or service from anywhere, at any time. In the era of personal computing, users with visual impairments required special-purpose, assistive technologies, such as screen readers, to interact with computers. This paper investigates whether technologies like screen readers have kept pace with, or have created a barrier to, the trend toward ubiquitous access, with a specific focus on desktop computing as this is still the primary way computers are used in education and employment.

A Platform Agnostic Remote Desktop System for Screen Reading.

Remote desktop technology, the enabler of access to applications hosted on remote hosts, relies primarily on scraping the pixels on the remote screen and redrawing them as a simple bitmap on the client's local screen. Such a technology will simply not work with screen readers since the latter are innately tied to reading text. Since screen readers are locked-in to a specific OS platform, extant solutions that enable remote access with screen readers such as NVDARemote and JAWS Tandem require homogeneity of OS platforms at both the client and remote sites.