An Accessible Environment to Integrate Blind Participants into Brainstorming Sessions

This paper presents user studies done for a system supporting blind people to take part in co-located brainstorming meetings. For supporting blind people, visual information exchange has to be made accessible to them. This visual information exchange takes place in two ways a) by using artefacts to hold and share visual information (e.g. text on blackboards, content of mind-map nodes) b) by non-verbal communication exchange (e.g. nodding to agree to someone’s arguments, pointing to highlight some important artefacts). The presented prototype uses Leap Motion to detect pointing gestures as a representative example for non-verbal communication elements, while for the artefact layer a mind-map is used. A so-called “blind user interface” serializes the star structure of this min-map and allows accessing it by the blind user through a regular screen reader.