T-TATIL: Mobile application for helping visually impaired people in reading and interpreting tactile drawings

Graphic contents are important resources to communicate information and their use is fundamental in the teaching process. Visually impaired people do not have easy access to this resource owing to their impairment. They mainly use tactile graphics to explore visual contents. In this article, we propose the development of a tool for tablets intended to aid visually impaired people in interpreting tactile graphics. After studying different exploration strategies of tactile graphics adopted by visually impaired people, we propose an application that utilizes the benefit of multimodal interactions. Through a case study, three blind students tested the prototype of the application, demonstrating that the solution is a promising approach to aid in the exploration of tactile graphics.