Consideration of the experiences of blind people using four user interfaces for editing of tactile graphics

Blind people are able to access visual information if the information is expressed by tactile graphics; however, it is almost impossible that blind people express their ideas or opinions by visual information such as diagrams, if they do not have any help from sighted people. So, in this paper, we discuss the experiences of blind people using four user interfaces for independent editing of tactile graphics. We first introduce the four tactile graphics creation systems with refreshable braille displays; the user interfaces are designed so that blind people are able to edit tactile graphics by themselves. Usability of each system is discussed based on the subjective evaluation of the blind participants.