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In recent years, smartphones (e.g., Apple iPhone) are getting more and more widespread among visually impaired people. Indeed, thanks to natively available screen readers (e.g., VoiceOver) visually impaired persons can access most of the smartphone functionalities and applications. Nonetheless, there are still some operations that require long time or high mental workload to be completed by a visually impaired person. In particular, typing on the on-screen QWERTY keyboard turns out to be challenging in many typical contexts of use of mobile devices (e.g., while moving on a tramcar). In this paper we present the results of an experimental evaluation conducted with visually impaired people to compare the native iPhone on-screen QWERTY keyboard with TypeInBraille, a recently proposed typing technique based on Braille. The experimental evaluation, conducted in different contexts of use, highlights that TypeInBraille significantly improves typing efficiency and accuracy.

Blind people are used to read mathematical notations through sequential representations (e.g. most Braille codes represent fractions, superscripts and underscripts in a sequential pattern). In mathematics, many notations cannot be represented through a sequential pattern without a loss of suggestivity and expressiveness (e.g. matrices, polynomial division, long division, automata, etc.). This paper introduces a multimodal interaction paradigm which aims to enable blind people to explore and edit mathematical notations which cannot be represented through a sequential pattern. So far, this interaction paradigm has been implemented in the LAMBDA system.

Speech input has proven to be useful for entering text in electronic documents, and seems to be a promising technique also for writing mathematical expressions. Up to now, there is no evidence about the potential advantages of speech input on blind persons who need to edit scientific documents. This paper introduces a technique to enable blind persons to input mathematics by speech. A system prototype has been developed, based on the LAMBDA mathematical editor and the Dragon NaturallySpeakingTMsoftware. An early assessment has been undertaken with a group of blind users. The results of this evaluation will be discussed in this paper and will be exploited to enhance the system prototype.

This paper introduces a multimodal interactive system which aims to enable blind and visually impaired persons to create, manipulate and explore graph structures in a 3D space. An audio-haptic interaction paradigm has been designed to ensure a non-visual experience of graph structures. Visual feedback makes possible communication about graphs between non-sighted and sighted users. The multimodal manipulation and exploration techniques are introduced together with the system prototype. Early evaluation results are illustrated.

Blind and visually impaired students seldom choose to attend university technical or scientific courses. The major problems concern access to scientific documentation, to scientific software and getting advantage of attending lessons. Many solutions exist, but they are often available or known at national level. This paper introduces the @science thematic network, which aims at collecting and documenting pratices and experiences at transnational level to facilitate blind and visually impaired students to go through scientific studies at university.

At present, digital scientific resources can be hardly read by visually impaired people. The systems to retrieve and download documents in digital libraries can be easily used also through speech and tactile assistive technologies. The main problems concern the digital formats employed to store documents. Therefore, visually impaired readers often find the right document, but they cannot read it. That often affects the learning process especially at university. In order to contribute to the preparation of guidelines to provide accessible digital scientific resources and to widespread best practices and best experiences achieved by university libraries and support services, the thematic network aScience was established. It is a two years project supported by the European Union eContentPlus Programme. The web portal www.ascience.eu delivers information about the thematic network activities and it will distribute sample documents of digital scientific literature accessible through speech and tactile assistive technologies.