Presenting non-verbal communication to blind users in brainstorming sessions

Abstract

In co-located meetings, which are part of our professional and educational lives, information exchange relies not only on information exchange using artifacts like bubbles in mind-maps or equations presented on electronic whiteboards in classrooms, but also to a large extent on non-verbal communication. In the past much effort was done to make the artifact level accessible but also non-verbal communication heavily relies on the visual channel to which blind people do not have access. Thereby co-located meetings are seen as first domain to research accessibility of non-verbal communication, which are well defined and should lead to more general research on access to non-verbal communication. We present a first prototypical system which allows experimenting with access to non-verbal communication elements by blind people using both the input from a "human" transcriber or automatic tracking and recognition of non-verbal communication cues. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.