ASVI - Accessible System for Visually Impaired

Overview

The main objective of this project is to enhance the accessibility of various products for users with impaired vision. The developed system would help the users make efficient use of different products/ appliances; particularly in public environments like Microwave, ATM, Vending Machine and various electronic devices. This wearable device helps the target user to perform the activities of daily living more independently, without relying on caretakers or external help. Our aim is to take the ’Dis’ Out of ’Disabilities’ for visually impaired users, that is, to achieve equitable access to technologies for our target user group.


User Profile

User Interviews, surveys, focus group and some basic literature survey were used to decide on the target user group, understand their characteristics and better understand the definition and implications of problem space defined earlier. Visually impaired users encompass individuals with both low and no vision at all. The user group selected for the problem space consists of visually impaired individuals from later teenage years to early seniors. The main characteristics and reason for this particular user group include:

  • Users actively interact with their environment
  • Willingness to adapt new technology or system
  • Need for independence with daily activities and tasks

Further literature survey and talking to experts helped in molding the scope of our problem and coming up with the requirement specifications.


Scenario

Electronic devices like microwaves and exercise equipment were selected as benchmark devices for designing and testing purposes, though, with the aim of making all the electronic devices easily accessible to the user group. We then built scenarios based on user walkthrough from the initial survey and our initial understanding of how users currently use these systems. A sample scenario is shown below, where the user has to make his dinner by reheating the food for 15 mins, after coming home from work.




Design Alternatives

To come up with some innovative, easy and simple to use solution to the problem space, we held several brainstorming session. Initial brainstorming sessions were more focused on quantity rather than quality. Three ideas serving the problem space were then shortlisted from the pool of solutions/ideas generated from initial brainstorming session. These ideas were then detailed out intensely figuring out their individual details, functionality, advantages and disadvantages. These ideas are summarised in the figure below.


Final Design and Prototyping

The chosen alternatives with their features, known advantages and disadvantages along with target user persona and sample usage scenarios were presented to audience comprising of peers, faculty and subject experts. This helped us in choosing the right alternative irrationally without being attached to a particular alternative. The poster from the presentation can also be downloaded from this link.

The chosen idea was ‘Feel It!’. This concept proved to be an innovative idea by acting as a mere conversion device translating the text, numbers and symbols into a form which my target user can perceive easily, that is, speech output or braille. The working of the concept for the chosen scenario (as explained above) is illustrated below.

Our solution is a wearable device for the wrist or hand, depending on context of use and user comfort. User scans the area which he wants to ‘read’ using his hand and the device converts text in that area to braille or enlarges it on the opposite side of the device. It also provides auditory feedback depending on user preference.
The proposed design solution was then prototyped to evaluate the usability and accessibility of the product. Processing environment was used to build OCR (Optical Character Recognition) simulation, which took the input from the camera placed on the glove’s palm on the users hand, also shown above.

Evaluation

Prototype developed was very crude in levels of fidelity, but served it’s purpose of being used in a ‘Wizard of Oz’ usability evaluation. Six users were recruited to evaluate the system on usability metrics of effectiveness, efficiency, satisfaction, ease of use, consistency, robustness and learnability.

For complete details of the evaluation method and protocol, please download the Usability Testing Protocol Document. The complete evaluation was measured for both assisted and unassisted events, to measure the ease of use, effectiveness and learnability of the system. The generated data set from all 6 sample users was analyzed to yield results. A sample graph is also shown below.

For complete results, please download the Full Project Report. You can also view the final poster from presentation.