Sectioned User Interface with Audible Tone Mapping for Visually Impaired Navigation
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Solution Overview
Problem
Existing assistive technologies for visually impaired users, such as those for computers and mobile devices, often provide inconsistent or non-intuitive user experiences and may not work well with all applications, making it difficult for users to interact effectively with complex data.
Innovation Solution
A system that divides the user interface into sections, each associated with a category, using audible tones to provide feedback and outputting speech data based on touch gestures, allowing users to navigate and interact with information in a consistent and intuitive manner across applications.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Ease of operation
If existing assistive technologies are used to help visually impaired users interact with computers and mobile devices, then basic text-to-speech and image enlargement functions are provided, but the user experience becomes inconsistent and non-intuitive when dealing with complex data across different applications
Solution Approach 1:
The display area is divided into multiple sections, each representing a different data category (e.g., photos, messages, notifications). Each section is assigned a unique audible tone frequency, allowing visually impaired users to navigate and identify categories through audio feedback without experiencing the inconsistency of generic assistive technologies across different applications.
Solution Approach 2:
The system provides a universal interface framework that works consistently across different applications and data types. By implementing a standardized section-based audio feedback mechanism that can be applied to any application, the system achieves both ease of operation and adaptability, resolving the contradiction between user experience consistency and application compatibility.
2Loss of information
If the user interface is divided into multiple sections with different audible tones for each category, then visually impaired users can navigate and interact with more complex data, but the device complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system uses audible tone feedback to indicate which data category section the user is currently viewing or interacting with. This feedback mechanism provides clear orientation without requiring complex visual interfaces, enabling accessible navigation of complex data structures while maintaining relatively simple implementation through audio output.
3Ease of operation
If audible tones are mapped to different sections to provide category information, then navigation becomes more intuitive, but the loss of visual information increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system replaces visual information delivery with acoustic information delivery. By substituting the visual display mechanism with audio feedback (tones and speech), the system makes navigation intuitive for visually impaired users while accepting that visual information is inherently lost to this user群体. The substitution transforms the information delivery modality rather than attempting to preserve both visual and audio channels simultaneously.
Data Source
AI summary
A method of and system for presentencing a user interface for the visually impaired is carried by dividing a user interface area of a user interface into a plurality of sections, mapping a different audible tone to each one of the plurality of sections, associating each one of the plurality of sections with a category, displaying a pane in one section of the plurality of sections, the pane having information about the category associated with the one section, receiving a first touch gesture on the pane, outputting a first audio signal having an audible tone mapped to the section, and depending on a type of the first touch gesture, outputting speech data for at least some of the information, the some of the information depending on a duration and a direction of the first touch gesture.