A haptic and auditory assistive user interface: Helping the blinds on their computer operations

In this paper, a study of assistive devices with multi-modal feedback is conducted to evaluate the efficiency of haptic and auditory information towards the users' mouse operations. Haptic feedback, generated by a combination of wheels driven by motors, is provided through the use of the haptic mouse. Meanwhile, audio feedback either in the form of synthesized directional speech or audio signal. Based on these interfaces, a set of experiments are conducted to compare their efficiencies. The measurement criteria used in this experiment are the distance regarding to the target circle in pixels, the operational time for the task in milliseconds, and opinion in term of understandability and comfortability towards each modal of the tested user interfaces in discrete indices. The experimental results show that with the proper modalities of feedback interfaces for the user, the efficiency can be improved by either the reduction in operational time or the increase of accuracy in pointing the target. Furthermore, the justification is also based on the user's satisfaction towards using the device to conduct the predefined cursor movement task, which occasionally is difficult to understand and interpret by the user. For example of the application adopting the proposed interface system, a web browser application is implemented and explained in this paper.