Volume 11, Number 1

Design Tactile Interfaces with Vibration Patterns in HTML5 for Smartphone Users with Visual Impairments

  Authors

George Kokkonis¹, Vasileios Moysiadis², Theofano Kollatou³ and Sotirios Kontogiannis⁴, ¹Western Macedonia University of Applied Sciences,Greece, ²University of Western Macedonia, Greece ³Western Macedonia University of Applied Sciences, Greece, ⁴University of Ioannina, Greece

  Abstract

This paper describes the procedure for creating tactile interfaces for Android smart phones. It uses the HTML5 Vibration API and the Javascript programming language to create vibration patterns in order to increase the interaction between visually impaired people with their smart phones. Apart from vision, audio and haptics are used to maximize the Human – Computer Interaction between the Android phones and users with visual impairments. Three methods are proposed for the creation of tactile interfaces in smart phones, one is with the use of the HTML image map tag, and the other with the Mask R-CNN Artificial Intelligence algorithm. The Mean Opinion Score procedure is used in order to evaluate the proposed vibration patterns for Human - Computer Interaction Techniques.

  Keywords

Tactile interfaces, Haptics, Vibration patterns, HTML5, Vibration API, Mask R-CNN.