POSTER: Using low-cost devices to support non-visual interaction with diagrams Oussama Metatla, Fiore Martin, Nick Bryan-Kinns, Tony Stockman School of Electronic Eng. & Computer Science Queen Mary University of London {oussama, fiore, nickbk, tonys}@eecs.qmul.ac.uk ABSTRACT We present a series of explorations into the feasibility of us- ing low-cost devices to design support for non-visual inter- action with diagrams. These explorations are a follow up to the Collaborative Cross-modal Interfaces project (CCmI 1 ), a Digital Economy Research in the Wild project which inves- tigated the use of multimodal input and output technolo- gies to improve the accessibility of collaboration between visually-impaired and sighted individuals when using dia- grams in the workplace. Categories and Subject Descriptors K.4.2 [Social Issues]: Assistive technologies for persons with disabilities; H.5.3 [Group and Organisation Inter- faces:]: Collaborative computing, Computer-supported co- operative work. General Terms Design, Human Factors Keywords Cross-modal interaction, low-cost devices, inclusion 1. INTRODUCTION CCmI investigated support for collaboration where partic- ipants have differing access to modalities. One of the main outcomes of CCmI was the development and release of an open-source software for collaborative editing of nodes-and- links diagrams. Non-visual interaction in this tool is sup- ported by combining auditory and haptic views of diagrams content incorporating speech and non-speech sounds and a PHANTOM Omni haptic device. The use of the haptic de- vice is particularly important to support spatial exploration 1 http://ccmi.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/ Funded by EPSRC EP/H042865/1, current work funded by EP/E045235/1 Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Digital Futures ’12 Aberdeen, UK Copyright 20XX ACM X-XXXXX-XX-X/XX/XX ...$15.00. of diagram content. While the use of audio is fairly cost ef- fective, the use of the PHANTOM Omni - which at the time of writing costs over £1000 - could hinder the wide adoption of the developed software by user communities. We there- fore aimed to explore the extent to which low-cost devices could support the kind of interactions that we implemented using the PHANTOM Omni in the original design, which was thoroughly evaluated in [2]. 2. LOW-COST DEVICES We chose to explore the use of a Wacom Bamboo TM Tablet 2 and a Novint Falcon R  controller 3 . Our choices were based on both the retail price range of these devices and on their potential to support spatial interaction with virtual content. The developed prototype designs for both devices addressed three aspects of non-visual interaction: 1) capturing the spa- tial aspects of diagram content, 2) support for non-visual in- spection of content, and 3) support for active editing. The developed prototypes were informally evaluated with one visually-impaired user. (a) (b) Figure 1: (a) The Wacom Bamboo multi-touch tablet, and (b) the Novint Falcon game controller. 2.1 Wacom Bamboo Tablet The Wacom Bamboo Tablet is a small tablet which in- cludes sensors for both pen and multi-touch input (Fig- ure 1(a)) and is intended for use as a substitute for a mouse and as a sketching tool. At the time of writing, the device costs between £80 and £100. Spatial representation – To capture its spatial layout, we transform a given diagram into a simplified represen- tation that captures the essence of its content and arrange- ments, which we then reproduced on a new window (Figure 2 2 www.wacom.com 3 www.novint.com/index.php/novintfalcon