When there is information overload on the visual modality, another system of warnings must be adopted to prevent potential risks—tactile warning systems present a viable alternative. Building on work on design approaches for auditory warning systems that match appropriate warnings to the severity of risk, this thesis presents an approach to design tactile warnings based on perceived urgency. To do this, I use a subjective rating technique. I performed three experiments to demonstrate this approach. Our research approach uses subjective rating technique to evaluate perceived urgency. Three experiments were conducted to design tactile warnings with a tactile interface developed by attaching a grid of tactors on a vest. In Experiment 1 and 2, I evaluated perceived urgency of several warning designs with three important parameters of tactile warnings with subjective rating. In Experiment 3 I examined one warning design in the context of flight simulation. The results of Experiment 1 and 2 showed that participants can discriminate between all levels of perceived urgency from most warning parameters. In Experiment 3, the results showed that selected warning design was correctly mapped with the severity of most events. The findings suggest that tactile warnings based on perceived urgency can be a possible approach, but further studies will be required to evaluate different parameters of tactile warnings.

When there is information overload on the visual modality, another system of warnings must be adopted to prevent potential risks—tactile warning systems present a viable alternative. Building on work on design approaches for auditory warning systems that match appropriate warnings to the severity of risk, this thesis presents an approach to design tactile warnings based on perceived urgency. To do this, I use a subjective rating technique. I performed three experiments to demonstrate this approach. Our research approach uses subjective rating technique to evaluate perceived urgency. Three experiments were conducted to design tactile warnings with a tactile interface developed by attaching a grid of tactors on a vest. In Experiment 1 and 2, I evaluated perceived urgency of several warning designs with three important parameters of tactile warnings with subjective rating. In Experiment 3 I examined one warning design in the context of flight simulation. The results of Experiment 1 and 2 showed that participants can discriminate between all levels of perceived urgency from most warning parameters. In Experiment 3, the results showed that selected warning design was correctly mapped with the severity of most events. The findings suggest that tactile warnings based on perceived urgency can be a possible approach, but further studies will be required to evaluate different parameters of tactile warnings.

It is still recognized as a challenge task while blind and visually impaired people travel outdoor independently, even if there are a number of assistive mobility aids available. In addition to building universal facilities in urban and rural environments for them, it is essential to develop novel mobility assistive technologies and systems to satisfy their increasing demands for mobility. To investigate those demands, an international survey with 106 blind and visually impaired people from 13 countries is undertaken within this work, with regarding to outdoor mobility experiences, usages of mobile devices and collaborative approaches. From the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Accessibility, the dissertation focuses on enhancing blind people’s capabilities of acquisition of spatial environmental information from tactile displays. The spatial environmental information, in this study, is in terms of clusters of surrounding obstacles, geographic information on city maps, and information on environmental accessibility. In order to non-visual representation of the clusters of surroundings obstacles detected by a 3D Time-of-Flight (ToF) infrared camera, a portable pin-matrix display with a matrix of 30 x 32 pins is employed and a pre-designed set of tactile obstacle symbols is used to render the properties of obstacles (e.g., type, size). Additionally, aiming at helping blind people access geographic information, a desktop based pin-matrix display (an array of 60 x 120 pins) and a mobile pin-matrix display (an array of 30 x 32 pins) are used to represent a large-scale city map and a location-aware city map, respectively. A set of tactile map symbols rendered with the raised and lowered pins, has been designed for rendering various map features. To allow blind and visually impaired people to acquire information on environmental accessibility, besides a traditional web browser client and a popular smart phone client, an audio-haptic client on a tactile display with 7200 pins is developed. Users are able to create and share collaborative annotations on environmental accessibility across the 3 clients. The proposed approaches about non-visual representation of obstacles and map features by tactile symbols on pin-matrix displays, will contribute to the fields of accessible tactile graphic well, especially in the coming era of affordable pin-matrix displays. Meanwhile, the collaborative approach for improving environmental accessibility will encourage the society to raise the floor of accessibility for all. A number of further studies can be continued based on the current findings within this work, aiming at enhancing mobility aids for blind and visually impaired people gradually.

Dans les secteurs de l’automobile et l’aéronautique, l’interaction avec les écrans tactiles peut être rendue plus fiable par l’ajout d’un retour vibratoire (effet haptique) envoyé directement au doigt de l’utilisateur au moment du contact avec l’écran. Des patterns vibratoires complexes peuvent ainsi être créés afin d’améliorer la qualité de la sensation perçue et le plaisir de l’utilisation. Dans ce contexte, notre première contribution concerne l’analyse de patterns vibratoires à l’aide de la transformée en ondelettes continue du signal délivré par la dalle, afin d’extraire les caractéristiques les plus saillantes, choisies d’après une étude psychophysique du sens tactile, et qui sont en liaison avec la perception. A partir de ces caractéristiques, notre deuxième contribution s’articule autour d’un modèle psychophysique de la perception vibrotactile élaboré en utilisant des règles floues générées par une méthode originale étendant l’approche classique de Wang-Mendel. Le modèle prédit le niveau de confort induit par un pattern vibratoire en fonction de ses paramètres psychophysiques. Il présente de bonnes performances quantitatives. La connaissance ainsi obtenue a permis l’identification de plusieurs tendances comportementales importantes pour la perception vibrotactile comme l’effet de l’énergie et de la texture vibrotactile. La troisième contribution porte sur la conception d’un modèle ergonomique de la perception vibrotactile, en s’appuyant sur les évaluations d’un expert du domaine automobile. Suite aux bonnes performances obtenues, le modèle a été adapté avec succès pour le domaine aéronautique. Les résultats de cette thèse permettent ainsi d’aider les équipementiers en simplifiant la conception des effets haptiques adéquats, destinés à améliorer l’interaction avec les écrans tactiles / In the field of automotive and aeronautical industries, human interaction with touch interfaces can be improved by using vibratory feedback or haptic effects, directly delivered to the user finger upon screen interaction. This new approach, which pro-actively stimulates the tactile sense, provides a safer and reliable way to interact with touch interfaces. Moreover, complex vibrational patterns can be designed in order to offer unique tactile sensations and thus increase user’s quality of experience. In this context, our first contribution focuses on a time-frequency analysis of vibrational patterns using the continuous wavelet transform of the signal delivered by the interface, in order to extract its most salient features, chosen based on a psychophysical study of the tactile sense, and which account for human perception. Using these features, our second contribution is a psychophysical model of vibrotactile perception developed using fuzzy logic and an original rule-base extraction method extending the classical Wang-Mendel approach. This model predicts the perceived comfort induced by a vibratory pattern according to its psychophysical properties, and shows good performances. The knowledge retrieved allowed the detection of several behavioral paradigms of vibrotactile perception, such as the effect of energy and texture. Our third contribution is the development of an ergonomic model of vibrotactile perception based on the evaluations of an automobile expert. Thanks to its good performances, the model was successfully adapted to the aeronautics area.The results of this thesis provide assistance to equipment suppliers by simplifying the conception of haptic effects intended to improve human interaction with touch interfaces.

This master’s thesis explores what could be the usability affordances of tactile interfaces, imbedded with physical commands, and voice interfaces,when used by older people that have visual impairments and cognitive declines. The aim is to contribute to the development of more accessible media.Through an adapted design thinking approach and qualitative methods, relevant literature, benchmarking on existing technologies, and empirical data, it has showed that the usability affordances of the two interfaces differ from each other. The presence of variousus ability affordances is found to be decided by individual perception and severity of impairments. Thus, each interface accommodates some users better than others. The outcome of the master’s thesis can be used for future developers of accessible media when exploring new interfaces that could be better suited for people with disabilities.

La perte de vision périphérique (vision tubulaire) a pour conséquence de nombreux déficits qui réduisent fortement l'autonomie des personnes qui en sont atteintes et par conséquent leur qualité de vie. Nombre de ces déficits témoignent d'une cognition spatiale dégradée mettant en jeu des relations étroites entre vision périphérique et représentations spatiales. Le double objectif de ce travail de thèse consiste à mieux comprendre la nature de ces relations et, sur la base de ces connaissances, contribuer à l'émergence de dispositifs d'assistance plus adaptés et performants, capables de suppléer l'absence de vision périphérique. Dans un premier temps, je me suis intéressé au rôle de la vision périphérique dans la construction de représentations spatiales égocentrées. J'ai d'abord collaboré à une expérience de psychophysique impliquant la détection en vision périphérique de cibles visuelles situées soit droit-devant, soit excentrées par rapport à l'axe du corps. En mesurant les temps de réaction nous avons pu démontrer que les sujets humains répondaient plus rapidement aux cibles présentées droit-devant qu'aux cibles excentrées. J'ai pris en charge une deuxième étude complémentaire portant sur le lien entre ce traitement sensoriel privilégié du droit-devant en vision périphérique et la dynamique des saccades oculaires de recentrage. En comparant les dynamiques de pro-saccades et d'anti-saccades de recentrage ou d' " excentrage ", j'ai pu mettre en évidence que la supériorité dynamique des saccades de recentrage guidées par la vision périphérique reposait à la fois sur des facteurs sensoriels et oculomoteurs. Ces travaux révèlent l'intégration précoce de signaux visuels et oculomoteurs en vision périphérique, pouvant servir à localiser les éléments visuels par rapport à soi et à privilégier le traitement des éléments situés dans l'axe droit-devant. Dans un deuxième temps, mes travaux ont abordé l'influence de la vision périphérique dans les représentations spatiales allocentrées. Pour étudier l'implication de la vision périphérique dans le codage allocentré, j'ai réalisé une expérience impliquant une tâche de pointage vers des cibles visuelles en vision centrale, accompagnées ou non d'indices visuels à différentes distances en vision périphérique. Les résultats obtenus montrent que des indices visuels capturés par la vision périphérique peuvent effectivement contribuer au codage allocentré d'une cible fixée, et ce même lorsque ces indices périphériques doivent être extraits de scène visuelles complexes en moins de 200 ms. Dans une étude complémentaire, j'ai montré que l'utilisation de ces indices allocentrés situés en périphérie avait un véritable rôle fonctionnel, accélérant les recherches visuelles. Ainsi, ces travaux révèlent une implication fonctionnelle forte de la vision périphérique dans l'extraction des relations spatiales entre éléments présents dans l'environnement visuel. J'ai voulu, durant la dernière partie de ma thèse, initier le développement d'un dispositif d'assistance dont la finalité est de suppléer les fonctions spatiales, égocentrées et allocentrées, de la vision périphérique. Comme preuve de concept, mon travail a consisté à concevoir et développer un dispositif tactile placé sur le poignet et capable de communiquer la position spatiale d'objets d'intérêt pour en simplifier leurs recherches visuelles. Les résultats obtenus chez des sujets sains avec un champ visuel artificiellement réduit (10°) montrent que l'interface tactile permet d'accélérer par trois la vitesse de recherche visuelle. Des résultats similaires ont été observés chez une personne atteinte de glaucome (champ visuel de 10x15°). Ma thèse pluridisciplinaire permet d'apporter un nouvel éclairage sur l'implication de la vision périphérique dans la construction de représentations spatiales, et elle propose de nouvelles pistes pour le développement de dispositifs d'assistance adaptés aux personnes atteintes de vision tubulaire. / The loss of peripheral vision (tunnel vision) leads to numerous deficits, reducing both independence and quality of life. These deficits reflect spatial cognition impairments, and highlight the close relationship between peripheral vision and spatial representations. This thesis has two main objectives: reaching a better understanding of the nature of these relationships, and using the acquired knowledge in order to propose adaptive, performant and innovative assistive devices able to overcome the peripheral loss. At first, I address the role of peripheral vision in egocentric space coding. I collaborated in a psychophysics experiment, involving detection of visual objects placed in peripheral vision. The visual objects formed similar images on the retina and differed only with respect to their egocentric location: either straight-ahead or eccentric with respect to the head/body midline. We found that straight-ahead objects elicit consistently shorter behavioral responses than eccentric objects. I took in charge a second study evaluating the link between the privileged sensory processing of the straight ahead direction and the dynamic of ocular saccades. Comparison between centripetal and centrifugal pro-saccades and anti-saccades revealed that the superior dynamic of centripetal saccades comes from both sensory and oculomotor factors. These works reveal the early integration of both visual and oculomotor signals in peripheral vision, leading to egocentric representations in which the straight ahead direction is highlighted. Secondly, I investigated the influence of peripheral vision in extracting allocentric spatial representations. In order to assess the role of peripheral vision in allocentric coding, I performed a memory-based pointing task toward previously gazed targets, which were briefly superimposed with visual cues placed at different eccentricities. The results showed that visual cues in peripheral (>10°) vision can contribute to the allocentric coding of a fixated target. A complementary experiment showed that these peripheral allocentric cues play a functional role, notably by facilitating visual searches. These works highlight the importance of peripheral vision in extracting functional spatial relationships between distant elements of the visual environment. Finally, I wanted to promote the development of new assistive devices, able to substitute both egocentric and allocentric spatial functions of the peripheral vision. As a proof of concept, I designed and evaluated a tactile interface mounted on wrist, communicating the spatial location of specific objects and facilitating visual search. Results showed that healthy subjects with artificial tunnel vision (10°) were able to increase by three visual search speeds thank to this tactile interface. Similar results were obtained on a glaucoma subject (field of view 10x15°). My multidisciplinary thesis highlights new roles of peripheral vision in spatial representations and proposes an innovative solution to develop assistive device for tunnel vision.

It is still recognized as a challenge task while blind and visually impaired people travel outdoor independently, even if there are a number of assistive mobility aids available. In addition to building universal facilities in urban and rural environments for them, it is essential to develop novel mobility assistive technologies and systems to satisfy their increasing demands for mobility. To investigate those demands, an international survey with 106 blind and visually impaired people from 13 countries is undertaken within this work, with regarding to outdoor mobility experiences, usages of mobile devices and collaborative approaches. From the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Accessibility, the dissertation focuses on enhancing blind people’s capabilities of acquisition of spatial environmental information from tactile displays. The spatial environmental information, in this study, is in terms of clusters of surrounding obstacles, geographic information on city maps, and information on environmental accessibility. In order to non-visual representation of the clusters of surroundings obstacles detected by a 3D Time-of-Flight (ToF) infrared camera, a portable pin-matrix display with a matrix of 30 x 32 pins is employed and a pre-designed set of tactile obstacle symbols is used to render the properties of obstacles (e.g., type, size). Additionally, aiming at helping blind people access geographic information, a desktop based pin-matrix display (an array of 60 x 120 pins) and a mobile pin-matrix display (an array of 30 x 32 pins) are used to represent a large-scale city map and a location-aware city map, respectively. A set of tactile map symbols rendered with the raised and lowered pins, has been designed for rendering various map features. To allow blind and visually impaired people to acquire information on environmental accessibility, besides a traditional web browser client and a popular smart phone client, an audio-haptic client on a tactile display with 7200 pins is developed. Users are able to create and share collaborative annotations on environmental accessibility across the 3 clients. The proposed approaches about non-visual representation of obstacles and map features by tactile symbols on pin-matrix displays, will contribute to the fields of accessible tactile graphic well, especially in the coming era of affordable pin-matrix displays. Meanwhile, the collaborative approach for improving environmental accessibility will encourage the society to raise the floor of accessibility for all. A number of further studies can be continued based on the current findings within this work, aiming at enhancing mobility aids for blind and visually impaired people gradually.

Submitted by Cássia Santos (cassia.bcufg@gmail.com) on 2017-08-01T10:48:34Z No. of bitstreams: 2 Dissertação - Joyce Siqueira - 2017.pdf: 19412017 bytes, checksum: ed71bf6287eda5153f70caad31c82d62 (MD5) license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Luciana Ferreira (lucgeral@gmail.com) on 2017-08-01T15:16:13Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 2 Dissertação - Joyce Siqueira - 2017.pdf: 19412017 bytes, checksum: ed71bf6287eda5153f70caad31c82d62 (MD5) license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-08-01T15:16:13Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 Dissertação - Joyce Siqueira - 2017.pdf: 19412017 bytes, checksum: ed71bf6287eda5153f70caad31c82d62 (MD5) license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) Previous issue date: 2017-07-14 / Touch screens have made smartphones much more dynamic. However, due to the absence of the physical keyboard, they also made them less accessible for visually impaired people. Considering the input of text as a primary function, the objective of this research was to develop a method that uses the Braille System for typing, from a new virtual keyboard, which is supported by a tactile film superimposed on the touch screen. The method was constructed considering the mobile accessibility guidelines developed by the W3C, World Wide Web Consortium, and the monitoring of a specialist user with congenital blindness and Braille literacy. As a result, BrailleÉcran was developed, the combination of an Android application with a tactile film modeled for 3D printing. Besides the film, the application has the "Configuration Panel", which allows the application to adapt to user preferences and the "Help Center", which provides a spoken tutorial. For evaluation, 10 volunteers performed the experiments that allowed the verification of speed, accuracy, usability and user experience. As a result WPM = 2.52 and TER = 2.68. The usability questionnaire brought positive results, of which we highlight the "You liked to use" issue with 90% acceptance. In the PANAS questionnaire, all the positive affects obtained a maximum score and the negative affects a minimum score. It is estimated that this research offers society not only a method but a quality assistive technology that provides more independence for the visually impaired. In addition, to expand the studies in this area, the prototypes are open source and are available for access and future contributions. / As telas sensíveis ao toque tornaram os smartphones muito mais dinâmicos. No entanto,devido à ausência do teclado físico, também os tornaram menos acessíveis para pessoascom deficiência visual. Considerando a entrada de texto uma função primária, o objetivodesta pesquisa foi o de desenvolver um método que utilizasse o Sistema Braille paradigitação, a partir de um novo teclado virtual, que tenha como suporte uma película tátilsobreposta à tela sensível ao toque. O método foi construído considerando as diretrizesde acessibilidade móvel, desenvolvidas pelaWorld Wide Web Consortium(W3C) e oacompanhamento de um especialista, com cegueira congênita e alfabetizado em Braille.Como resultado, desenvolveu-se o BrailleÉcran, a combinação de um aplicativo Androidcom uma película tátil, modelada para impressão 3D. Além da película, o aplicativo contacom o “Painel de Configuração”, que permite a adaptação do aplicativo às preferênciasdo usuário e a “Central de Ajuda”, que disponibiliza um tutorial falado. Para avaliação,10 voluntários realizaram os experimentos que possibilitaram a verificação da velocidade,da taxa de erros, da satisfação e da experiência do usuário. Como resultado obteve-se queo valor médio de palavras digitadas por minuto (WPM) foi de 2,52 e a taxa total de erros(TER) foi de 2,68%. A entrevista sobre a satisfação do usuário trouxe resultados positivos,dos quais destaca-se a afirmativa “Você gostou de usar”, com 90% de aceitação. Emrelação a experiência de uso, aplicou-se o questionário Afeto Positivo e Afeto Negativo(PANAS) e como resultado obteve-se que todos os afetos positivos foram aflorados,ao contrário dos negativos. Estima-se que esta pesquisa possa oferecer à sociedade ummétodo de qualidade. Ademais, para expansão dos estudos, os protótipos são de códigoaberto e estão disponíveis para acesso e futuras contribuições.