Virtual Braille-keyboard in co-located meetings

Abstract

Our daily live is no longer imaginable without touch devices. Besides standard touch devices as mobile phones and tablets also touch-tables have the chance to find their way into our daily lives. Co-located meetings can be seen as a good application area for touch-tables. They can present the artifact information layer to the whole group. On touch surfaces virtual keyboards are used by sighted people for text input and text manipulations. For blind people, such keyboards are only accessible with a decreased working speed. In co-located meetings, manipulation of artifacts (for instance bubbles of mind-maps) is very dynamic. Therefore, a decreased working speed to generate and manipulate textual inputs makes an equal participation of blind people in co-located meetings impossible. The ongoing work is concerned with the development of a virtual Braille-keyboard to allow a better integration of blind users into co-located meetings. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.