Tactile captions: Augmenting visual captions

Abstract

We explore the efficacy of tactile captions as a supplement to online captioned video. Closed captions are not fully accessible, because many auditory signals are not easily represented by words, e.g., the sound of the ball being hit by a bat, or to describe a ring tone. The goal is to explore whether audiovisual information can be effectively represented through an equivalent tactile-visual interface. We compare viewers preferences between viewing video with captions alone, and captions plus tactile captions. Our study showed that viewers significantly preferred tactile captions to captions. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.