Towards designing audio assistance for comprehending haptic graphs: A multimodal perspective

Abstract

Statistical graphs, such as line graphs are widely used in multimodal communication settings. Language accompanies graphs and humans produce gestures during the course of communication. For visually impaired people, haptic-audio interfaces provide perceptual access to graphical representations. The local and sequential character of haptic perception introduces limitations in haptic perception of hard-to-encode information, which can be resolved by providing audio assistance. In this article we first present a review of multimodal interactions between gesture, language and graphical representations. We then focus on methodologies for investigating hard-to-encode information in graph comprehension. Finally, we present a case study to provide insight for designing audio assistance. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.