Anke Brock

École Nationale de l’Aviation Civile | ENAC · Interactive Informatics Lab

Tactile relief maps are used by visually impaired people to acquire mental representation of space, but they retain important limitations (limited amount of information, braille text, etc.). Interactive maps may overcome these limitations. However, usability of these two types of maps had never been compared. It is then unknown whether interactive...

Similarity between tasks is an understudied factor in research on cognitive flexibility. This behavioural experiment had 31 participants perform a task switch paradigm in which participants were required to switch between 4 tasks of varying similarity. The experiment was constructed in a way that simultaneously allows for investigating the impact o...

In the context of light aviation, airborne communication between pilots and Air Traffic Control (ATC) is at present only ensured orally via a radio channel. To provide safer and more accessible communications and based on a FANS4ALL initiative, we are developing a multimodal Human-Machine Interface (HMI) combining the sight and touch. The device co...

Considerable fundamental studies have focused on the mechanisms governing cognitive flexibility and the associated costs of switching between tasks. Task-switching costs refer to the phenomenon that reaction times and accuracy decrease briefly following the switch from one task to another. However, cognitive flexibility also impacts day-to-day life...

Operators of complex systems across multiple domains (e.g., aviation, automotive, and nuclear power industry) are required to perform their tasks over prolonged and continuous periods of time. Mental fatigue as well as reduced cognitive flexibility, attention, and situational awareness all result from prolonged continuous use, putting at risk the s...

Board games allow us to share collective entertainment experiences. They entertain because of the interactions between players, physical manipulation of tokens and decision making. Unfortunately, most board games exclude people with visual impairments as they were not initially designed for players with special needs. Through a user-centered design...

La personnalisation est une solution envisagée depuis longtemps par les musées afin de faire face à la diversité des types de visiteurs et des contextes de visite. Cependant, elle reste souvent limitée à des scénarisations thématisées ou profilées selon des catégories typiques de visiteurs. Le croisement de plusieurs caractéristiques de visite, fix...

Orientation and Mobility (O8M) classes teach people with visual impairments how to navigate the world; for instance, how to cross a road. Yet, this training can be difficult and dangerous due to conditions such as traffic and weather. Virtual Reality (VR) can overcome these challenges by providing interactive controlled environments. However, most...

This year marked the 20th ACM SIGACCESS International Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2018) , held October 22-24 in Galway, Ireland. The ASSETS conference is the premier computing research conference exploring the design, evaluation, and use of computing and information technologies to benefit people with disabilities and older ad...

Interactive tactile graphics have shown a true potential for people with visual impairments, for instance for acquiring spatial knowledge. Until today, however, they are not well adopted in real-life settings (e.g. special education schools). One obstacle consists in the creation of these media, which requires specific skills, such as the use of ve...

Project VISTE “Empowering Spatial Thinking of Students with Visual Impairment” has been a Strategic Partnership in school education, co-funded by the Erasmus+ programme of the European Union (9/2016 – 8/2019) under Key Action 2: Cooperation for Innovation and Exchange of Good Practices. The project’s mission has been to develop a methodological, se...

Inclusive systems can be used both by people with and without impairments. This creates new opportunities for sighted and visually impaired people to collaborate with the same tool. Audio-tactile maps and virtual reality (VR) represent a safe and controlled environment for Orientation & Mobility (O&M) classes. These classes aim to teach visually im...

Exploring geographic maps on touchscreens is a difficult task in the absence of vision as those devices miss tactile cues. Prior research has therefore introduced non-visual interaction techniques designed to allow visually impaired people to explore spatial configurations on tactile devices. In this paper, we present a study in which six blind and...

Commercial drones have recently been developed to encompass use cases beyond aerial photography and videography. Researchers have explored wider applications of drones including using drones as social companions, as key components in virtual environments, as assistive tools for people with disabilities, and even as sport companions. However the upt...

This paper describes two studies with people with sensory, cognitive and motor impairments flying drones as a leisure activity. We found that despite several adaptations to existing technologies that match their abilities, flying remains very difficult due to the required perceptual and motor skills. We propose an adaptation space at hardware, soft...

In this forum we celebrate research that helps to successfully bring the benefits of computing technologies to children, older adults, people with disabilities, and other populations that are often ignored in the design of mass-marketed products. --- Juan Pablo Hourcade, Editor

Museums today are competing with the entertainment industry to attract visitors. Personalizing museum visits, depending on visitors' preferences, is one possible solution for making museums more attractive. Based on an analysis of the needs of museums professionals, we have designed five storyboards of interactions which allow a group of visitors t...

Recently, there has been a sharp increase in the number of students with disabilities (SWDs) enrolled in universities. Unfortunately SWDs still struggle to attain the same level of education as non-disabled students. This paper presents a collaborative approach between members of the student support service, researchers and a special needs student...

Tactile maps and diagrams are widely used as accessible graphical media for people with visual impairments, in particular in the context of education. They can be made interactive by augmenting them with audio feedback. It is however complicated to create audio-tactile graphics that have rich and realistic tactile textures. To overcome these limita...

This paper reports an empirical study of a multisensory map used by visually impaired primary school pupils, to study human habitats and differences between urban, suburban and rural areas using a local example. Using multimodal analysis, we propose to examine how the use of smell and taste shape pupils’ engagement and the development of a non-visu...

Interactive maps have become ubiquitous in our daily lives, helping us reach destinations and discovering our surroundings. Yet, designing map interactions is not straightforward and depends on the device being used. As mobile devices evolve and become independent from users, such as with robots and drones, how will we interact with the maps they p...

Current low-tech Orientation & Mobility (O&M) tools for visually impaired people, e.g. tactile maps, possess limitations. Interactive accessible maps have been developed to overcome these. However, most of them are limited to exploration of existing maps, and have remained in laboratories. Using a participatory design approach, we have worked close...

In this demonstration we showcase a new spatial augmented reality device (interactive projection) with three applications: education and experimentation of color models, map exploration for visually impaired people and scientific vulgarization of machine learning. The first exhibition is an interactive exploration about the nature of light. Visitor...

Digital maps represent an incredible HCI success-they have transformed the way people navigate in and access information about the world. While these platforms contain terabytes of data about road networks and points of interest (POIs), their information about physical accessibility is commensurately poor. Moreover, because of their highly graphica...

Tactile maps are commonly used to give visually impaired users access to geographical representations. Although those relief maps are efficient tools for acquisition of spatial knowledge, they present several limitations and issues such as the need to read braille. Several research projects have been led during the past three decades in order to im...

While popular digital maps support an unprecedented number of use cases, new reference map customization tools have been created for purposes for which those maps fall short. With the goal of informing the design of this new class of cartographic tools, we present the first study of naturalistic (" bespoke ") map customization behavior. Through a m...

Special education teachers for visually impaired students rely on tools such as raised-line maps (RLMs) to teach spatial knowledge. These tools do not fully and adequately meet the needs of the teachers because they are long to produce, expensive, and not versatile enough to provide rapid updating of the content. For instance, the same RLM can bare...

Although spherical displays become more and more pervasive, the design of interactive content for these displays still remains difficult as it requires most developers to get familiar with specific tools for managing the output and input. In this paper, we present a framework for developing applications for multitouch spherical displays that makes...

Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) have been in the focus of research in the field of Human-Computer Interaction for the past years. TUIs rely on manual exploration of physical objects for interacting with digital media. Although visually impaired people demonstrate efficient manual exploration strategies, there is surprisingly little work on non-visu...

People living with visual impairments face important challenges related to orientation and mobility which might even prevent them from travelling autonomously. Indeed, it is difficult to navigate in an unknown space in the absence of vision or to acquire knowledge about spaces before travelling. Historically, raised-line paper maps with braille tex...

The mobile application Be My Eyes connects blind users with sighted volunteers through a video and audio connection. In contrast to previous attempts, Be My Eyes has a large number of blind and sighted users. In this paper we report from a survey among 30 blind Be My Eyes users to guide future work in this domain. We describe for which situations b...

The mobile application Be My Eyes connects blind users with sighted volunteers through a video and audio connection. In contrast to previous attempts, Be My Eyes has a large number of blind and sighted users. In this paper we report from a survey among 30 blind Be My Eyes users to guide future work in this domain. We describe for which situations b...

In this paper we describe a brainstorming session with visually impaired users, a sighted locomotion trainer, as well as sighted and blind researchers. This brainstorming session was part of a larger project on designing accessible guidance systems for visually impaired people. In this session we specifically addressed the design of an accessible r...

We report on the design process leading to the creation of MapSense, a multi-sensory interactive map for visually impaired children. We conducted a formative study in a specialized institute to understand children’s educational needs, their context of care and their preferences regarding interactive technologies. The findings (1) outline the needs...

Avec l’essor des tablettes numériques, l’enjeu est de concevoir des techniques d’interaction (TI) adaptées aux déficients visuels permettant d’explorer des contenus graphiques avec les doigts en l’absence de relief. Sur la base de travaux concernant la perception tactile chez les DV et les TI adaptées, nous avons conçu trois TI basées sur des vibra...

Interactive geographic maps are today widely available, but remain mostly limited to standard interaction contexts. We introduce SyMAPse [3], a spatial augmented reality map, in which a virtual map is projected onto a physical piece of paper. In a preliminary study we compared interaction techniques based on multi-touch, tangible and spatial modali...

Visually impaired people face important challenges related to orientation and mobility. Indeed, 56% of visually impaired people in France declared having problems concerning autonomous mobility [10]. These problems often mean that visually impaired people travel less, which influences their personal and professional life and can lead to exclusion f...

Interactive geographic maps are today widely available, but remain mostly limited to standard interaction contexts. We introduce a spatial augmented reality map, in which a virtual map is projected on a physical piece of paper. In a preliminary study we compared interaction techniques based on multi-touch, tangible and spatial modalities for three...

L'Organisation Mondiale de la Santé estime que 285 millions de personnes sont atteintes de déficiences visuelles dans le monde entier [11]. Cette population est confrontée à des défis importants liés à la perception des données spatiales. En effet, parce qu'elles sont avant tout visuelles, les représentations spatiales ne sont pas facilement access...

In order to overcome challenges related to orientation and mobility, visually impaired people need to know their environment. Tactile relief maps are generally used for exploring geographic information, but they retain significant limitations. Recent technological progress allows the development of interactive maps which overcome these limitations....

In the absence of vision, mobility and orientation are challenging. Audio and tactile feedback can be used to guide visually impaired people. In this paper, we present two complementary studies on the use of vibrational cues for hand guidance during the exploration of itineraries on a map, and whole body-guidance in a virtual environment. Concretel...

Interactive tactile maps provide visually impaired people with accessible geographic information. However, when these maps are presented on large tabletops, tactile exploration without sight is long and tedious due to the size of the surface. In this paper we present a novel approach to speed up the process of exploring tabletop maps in the absence...

As touch screens become widely spread, making them more accessible to visually impaired people is an important task. Touch displays possess a poor accessibility for visually impaired people. One possibility to make them more accessible without sight is through gestural interaction. Yet, there are still few studies on using gestural interaction for...

Interactive technologies have a profound mediating effect on the way we obtain and contribute to knowledge, relate to each other and contribute to society. Often, "gender" is not a factor that is explicitly considered in the design of these technologies. When gender is considered, products are often designed with idealised models of gendered "users...

Orientation and mobility are amongst the most important challenges for visually impaired people. Tactile maps can provide them with spatial knowledge of their environment, thereby reducing fear related to traveling in space. To date, raised-line paper maps have been used to make geographic information accessible, but these paper maps have significa...

Knowing the geography of an urban environment is crucial for visually impaired people. Tactile relief maps are generally used, but they retain significant limitations (limited amount of information, use of braille legend, etc.). Recent technological progress allows the development of innovative solutions which overcome these limitations. In this th...

Exploring maps on tablets in the absence of vision raises many questions such as the question of the efficiency of exploration strategies. Two phases have been identified: an investigation phase, which aims to discover the items on the map, and a memorization phase, which aims to build a mental representation of the geographic space. These are two...

Worldwide there is a gender gap in technology with only a small part of all computer science related positions being held by women. Among different initiatives to encourage women to join STEM fields, we started a video interview initiative last year at CHI to encourage more women to enter and remain in the field of HCI as well as strengthening exis...

In recent years there has been a surge in the development of non-visual interaction techniques targeting two application areas: making content accessible to visually impaired people, and supporting minimal attention user interfaces for situationally impaired users. This SIG aims to bring together the community of researchers working around non-visu...

Technology has a profound mediating effect on the way we relate, obtain knowledge, and contribute to society. Worldwide there is a gender gap in technology with only a small part of all computer science related positions being held by women. Given the impact and potential ramifications of technology on our society, it is imperative that both male a...

Demo Hour highlights new prototypes and projects that exemplify innovation and novel forms of interaction. Leah Maestri, Editor

Visually impaired people face important challenges related to orientation and mobility. Accessible geographic maps are helpful for travel preparation. Historically, raised-line paper maps have been used, but these maps possess significant limitations. However, recent technological advances have enabled the design of accessible interactive maps that...

Multimodal interactive maps are a solution for presenting spatial information to visually impaired people. In this paper, we present an interactive multimodal map prototype that is based on a tactile paper map, a multi-touch screen and audio output. We first describe the different steps for designing an interactive map: drawing and printing the tac...

Tactile or interactive maps are largely used as an orientation aid for visually impaired people. However, little is known about haptic exploration strategies and their influence on the resultant cognitive mapping. We have designed a prototype with the potential to automatically analyze different users? exploration strategies. This prototype integra...

Multimodal interactive maps are a solution for providing the blind with access to geographic information. Current projects use a tactile map set down on a monotouch display with additional sound output. In our current project we investigated the usage of multitouch displays for this purpose. In this paper, we outline our requirements concerning the...

La conception participative est un processus de conception des systèmes interactifs qui implique les utilisateurs dans l?ensemble du processus du développement. Cependant elle présuppose que les utilisateurs disposent de toutes leurs capacités physiques, notamment visuelles. Les méthodes et outils utilisés ne sont souvent pas adaptés pour des perso...