OverviewThis STS will focus on emerging technologies capable of sensing environmental features for applications in access technologies for persons with visual impairment, including low vision and blindness. The development of environmental sensing technologies (ESTs) and the study of their potential to support the activities of daily living for visually impaired persons is progressing at a rapid pace, and engages many disparate research fields, including computer vision, wearable sensors, ubiquitous computing, crowdsourcing, man-machine interfaces, and human factors. It is important to create a forum to forge interdisciplinary links among practitioners in these fields and to promote research into ESTs that will have the greatest likelihood of having a real impact on the lives of people with visual impairment.Background and SignificanceESTs such as computer vision and mobile sensors hold the promise to greatly extend the capabilities afforded by more mature technologies such as GPS, already used in commercial systems for visually impaired persons to provide outdoor navigation and wayfinding assistance. For instance, computer vision has the potential to detect and recognize informational signs normally accessible only to those with normal vision. Indoor localization systems are also being developed that can provide visually impaired persons with wayfinding information where GPS is unavailable. Modern smartphones come equipped with screen readers, high resolution cameras with focusing capabilities, and multiple on-board sensors, providing an ideal platform to host many of these ESTs. Meanwhile, auxiliary hardware such as wearable sensors and bone conduction headsets add additional capabilities and improved form factors to the smartphone platform.While ESTs are developing at a rapid pace, harnessing their capabilities in assistive technology for the visually impaired community poses a variety of technological, design and human factors challenges. For example, while traditional computer vision applications are normally designed for imagery taken by a normally sighted user or acquired by a rigidly mounted camera, images taken by visually impaired individuals are normally highly unconstrained, especially for blind users who may not know where to aim the camera. Such applications often demand “vision without sight” – the ability of an access tool to provide a user interface (UI) to actively direct the search of a user with no useful vision towards likely targets of interest. Indeed, UI design – which demands a realistic understanding of the possibilities offered by the available interfaces (visual, audio, tactile) – is of paramount importance in the design of access tools, yet is often neglected or minimized when focus is placed solely on the design and optimization of the ESTs themselves. In addition to UI design, research on applications for the visually impaired population requires informed knowledge of many other human factor issues, including the actual problems impairing the activities of daily living of these users and an awareness of existing assistive aids. Finally, researchers must adopt a system-level approach to the design of algorithms and hardware that takes into consideration practical factors such as form factor, size, speed and cost.Call for ContributionsThe development of ESTs that meets these challenges demands participation by experts from multiple and disparate disciplines, including rehabilitation, clinical science, orientation and mobility, user interfaces, human factors and computer vision/sensors – the very range of expertise and approaches is invited to contribute to this STS in domains as:

Chairs

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  James Coughlan, Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute
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  Roberto Manduchi, UC Santa Cruz