Haptic Guidance to Support Design Education and Collaboration for Blind and Visually Impaired People

Designers create sketches, diagrams, and other visual media to both externalize a specific design concept as well as to explore design spaces. The largely visual and spatial nature of these diagrams used to support design activities poses several challenges for blind and visually impaired (BVI) designers to participate along sighted peers. This challenge includes the creation of tools to support the teaching of tactile graphics and their collaborative use in the context of design education. In efforts to address several of these challenges, we present PantoGuide, a low-cost system that provides audio and haptic guidance, via skin-stretch feedback to the dorsum of a user’s hand while the user explores a tactile graphic overlaid on a touchscreen. This system allows programming of haptic guidance patterns and cues for tactile graphics that can be experienced by students learning remotely or that can be reviewed by a student independently.