TouchPhoto: Enabling Independent Picture-Taking and Understanding of Photos for Visually-Impaired Users

Abstract

Photographs are a powerful medium for recording moments and sharing them with others. However, visually-impaired users have quite limited access to photograph’s benefits. In this paper, we present an integrated system TouchPhoto, which provides visual-audio-tactile assistive features to allow visually-impaired users to take and understand photographs independently. A user can take photographs with auditory guidance and record several audio tags to aid recall of the photograph’s content. For comprehension, a user can listen to the audio tags embedded in a photograph and also touch the photograph using an electrostatic friction display. The latter is done after salient features in the photograph, e.g., human faces, are extracted to facilitate tactile recognition.