This includes visually impaired students, who have similar career expectations as their sighted peers and whose numbers have more than tripled over the last 10 years. To compete on equal terms, they must be able to use the same information. Improvements in access to information will lead directly to improvements in quality of life and job prospects. We will therefore focus our research on the problems of this group. Current techniques for displaying information non-visually rely mainly on synthetic speech and Braille.
Users hear a line of digits read out or, if they read Braille, feel a row of digits.
Consider a sighted person reading a matrix of numbers. For example, there may be larger numbers at the bottom right or top left. A blind person would be unable to capitalise on these patterns in the data. Things become even worse when graphs or complex 3D plots are used because there are almost no techniques for presenting these in a non-visual way. Methods have been developed in the area of VR that allow use of senses other than sight.