A New Dactylology and Interactive System Development for Blind–Computer Interaction

Although a lot of work has been performed in the gesture-based human-computer interface, blind users still feel it is difficult to interact with computers. One of the major stumbling blocks is the lack of knowledge about their preferences toward hand gestures. A user evaluation study is conducted with 25 blind users to understand this fact and an optimal gesture set is devised. These gestures are selected based on the performance and preference measure analysis. Performance measure includes rating of gestures on four subjective criteria: easiness , naturalness, learning, and reproducibility. In preference measure, a new parameter called as preference index is proposed in this paper. The optimal gestures are further categorized into two groups: tier-1 and tier-2. On the basis of these gestures, a dactylology is proposed for blind users so that they can interact with a computer easily. A prototype model of the proposed interactive system has been developed and encouraging experimental results are obtained.