Takahiro Miura National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST)

With the increasing need for developing and disseminating information compensation methods for visually impaired people, there have been developed various sensory substitution technologies. However, since the visually impaired have unique sensory, perceptual, and cognitive systems, it is not always possible to employ the same presentation methods for the sighted. On the other hand, there are still many unknown issues regarding the unique SHITSUKAN perception of the visually impaired as well as the commonality with that of sighted people. We believe that if this point is clarified, it will become possible to develop a method for presenting varied SHITSUKAN to the visually impaired and share sensory experiences among the visually impaired and the sighted using this method. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to clarify and establish an inclusive texture presentation method for the visually impaired and sighted people to share a similar SHITSUKAN experience. We examine the following four issues:
1) Clarifying the similarities and differences in how visually impaired people and sighted people perceive SHITSUKAN using onomatopoeia.
(2) Developing an audible and tactile method to help visually impaired people recognize text information with fonts.
3) Building an audible and tactile method to help visually impaired people intuitively grasp image content.
4) Clarifying an audible method of spatial impressions for the visually impaired.