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The increasing use of visual diagrams in educational and work environments, and even our daily lives, has created obstacles for individuals who are blind or visually impaired to independently access the information they represent. Although physical tactile pictures can be created to convey the visual information, it is typically a slow, cumbersome, and costly process. Refreshable haptic displays, which interact with computers, promise to make this access quicker, easier, and cheaper. One important aspect in converting visual to tactile diagrams is to simplify the diagram as otherwise it can be too difficult to interpret with touch. Enabling this to be under user control in an interactive environment, such as with refreshable displays, could allow users to avoid being overwhelmed by the diagrams at any instant in time while still retaining access to all information in "storage". Through this article the authors investigate whether two types of diagram simplification--boundary simplification and contextual simplification--showed potential utility in an interactive environment. Boundary simplification was found to be significantly helpful in answering general questions about borders on a geographic map, and contextual simplification was helpful in answering relational questions, as compared to using the original map unchanged.

An increasing amount of information content used in school, work, and everyday living is presented in graphical form. Unfortunately, it is difficult for people who are blind or visually impaired to access this information, especially when many diagrams are needed. One problem is that details, even in relatively simple visual diagrams, can be very difficult to perceive using touch. With manually created tactile diagrams, these details are often presented in separate diagrams which must be selected from among others. Being able to actively zoom in on an area of a single diagram so that the details can be presented at a reasonable size for exploration purposes seems a simpler approach for the user. However, directly using visual zooming methods have some limitations when used haptically. Therefore, a new zooming method is proposed to avoid these pitfalls. A preliminary experiment was performed to examine the usefulness of the algorithm compared to not using zooming. The results showed that the number of correct responses improved with the developed zooming algorithm and participants found it to be more usable than not using zooming for exploration of a floor map.