NEW PERSPECTIVES FOR THE BLIND WITH UPCOMING TABLET AND SMARTPHONE BASED SOLUTIONS

Resumo

Several initiatives in the last few decades have been launched aiming at additional tactile feedback for the people who are blind. Most of those relied on special hardware which could stimulate either the hands, the tongue or other parts of the body to let the visually impaired absorb some additional environmental information, thus enhancing their life quality. The
recent development of powerful personal programmable appliances, like new tablets and smartphones, opens a wider range of opportunities for the deployment of affordable solutions for persons who bear disabilities as vision loss. This work includes initially a review showing some of the landmarks in the development of haptic equipments and then presents a set of recent tactile innovations, as well as the proposition of a project designed to offer an accessibility application based on the Android platform for adaptability performance testing by visually impaired users.