eXtended Reality for All – Haptics (RIA)

eXtended Reality, combining human-machine interactions and all real, mix, augmented and virtual environments, allow users to interact with real-time contextual information activated by intuitive sensory triggers. However, in order to provide eXtended Reality for all, specific accessibility oriented development is required.

Indeed, certain categories of information such as scientific formulae, computer code, tabular data, photos and images cannot be efficiently rendered by the blind and visually impaired by using braille readers or text to speech technologies. Furthermore, the increase of distant learning and teleworking has highlighted the lack of tactile feedback possibilities and increased the gap for visually impaired accessibility.

Existing tactile solutions are limited to refreshable braille displays which are bulky and/or prohibitively expensive. They offer a limited reading experience by providing only a single line of characters at a time and their output is considerably slower than an experienced user’s ability to read braille.

Drawing on the above-mentioned conclusion, the proposal will develop an affordable, portable, usable full-page device able to convey and input digital information in both braille and tactile graphics for people with visual impairments.

Consortium will pay attention to develop solutions that are reliable, robust, safe and meet the needs and preferences of visually impaired people. The solution need to be interoperable with other ICT devices, including other assistive technologies, provides open APIs for use by third parties and allow for back-translation of braille or tactile graphics into text or images to enable cooperation between visually impaired and sighted people.

People with visual impairments should be involved in all stages of the research and development. Their involvement in validating the solution is a minimum requirement.

In this topic the integration of the gender dimension (sex and gender analysis) in research and innovation content is not a mandatory requirement.