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PhD Studentship, University of Glasgow
May 04 04
Source: BCS-HCI
MultiVis II: Multimodal Tools to Allow Blind People to Create and Manipulate Visualisations
http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~stephen/grants/jobs.shtml
Understanding and manipulating information using visualisations such as graphs, tables, bar charts and 3-dimensional (3D) plots is a very common task for sighted people. The skills needed are learned early in school and then used throughout life, for example, in analysing information, creating presentations to show to others, or for managing home finances.
The basic skills needed for creating and manipulating graphs, for example, are necessary for all parts of education and employment. Blind people have very restricted access to information presented in these visual ways. It is currently very hard for them to create, manipulate and communicate visualisations such as graphs and tables. To allow blind people to gain the skills needed for the workplace new technologies are necessary to make visualisations usable. The aim of this project will be to use multimodality to allow blind people to create and manipulate visualisations using the senses of hearing and touch.
The novel aspect of EPSRC-funded MultiVis II project will be to use multimodal techniques to allow blind users to create and manipulate visualisations themselves in flexible and efficient ways. There are almost no computer-based tools that a blind person could use him/herself to create a visualisation. To facilitate creation we will investigate haptic (force-feedback) and audio tools to allow users to create visualisations interactively, adding and removing points and interacting with the visualisation as they go. We will also investigate two-handed interaction and haptic beacons to improve navigation within and control of displays. The project will fund one PhD student and one postdoctoral Research Fellow to work together to solve these problems.
Some of the key areas to be investigated are:
.. Techniques to allow blind people to interactively create visualisations themselves;
.. A more natural, two-handed interaction with the visualisations;
.. Mixed reality visualisation tool;
.. External memory and navigation aids to help people discover, mark and rediscover important data features;
.. Collaborative visualisation tools to allow users to work together.
For full details on both posts see:
http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~stephen/grants/jobs.shtml
This project builds upon the successful MultiVis project
(www.multivis.org) which looked at how visualisations such as graphs, tables and 3D plots should be best presented to blind users. The website for the MultiVis project gives much more detail on what we have done.
Our haptics webpage (http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~steven/haptics.htm) gives more general information about the work we do with touch in the group.
Informal enquiries may be made to Stephen Brewster on +44 (0)141 330 4966, stephen at dcs.gla.ac.uk