Tactile Mouse

* Abstract

For the purpose of providing access for blind people to graphical information on the computer screen, a device called "tactile mouse" has been developed. It consists of an ordinary computer mouse with a small tactile display unit on its top. The combinatory effect of the active movement of the hand and the tactile feedback to the fingers makes users feel as if they were exploring tangible drawings.

By adequately adjusting the ratio of hand movement to pins, subjects in the experiment were able to distinguish geometric figures; triangles, squares, pentagons, hexagons, and circles.

A horizontal line and the cursor on the CRT.

A horizontal row of raised dots on the Tactile Mouse.

An oblique line and the cursor on the CRT.

An oblique row of raised dots on the Tactile Mouse.

These four pictures show the correspondance between a line on the CRT display and a row of raised dots.
Upper Left: A horizontal line and the cursor on the CRT.
Upper Right: A horizontal row of raised dots on the Tactile Mouse.
Lower Left: An oblique line and the cursor on the CRT.
Lower Right: An oblique row of raised dots on the Tactile Mouse.

Tactile Mouse Version 1 (left) and Version 2 (right).

Tactile Mouse Version 3 (left) and Version 4 (right).

* Papers

Tomohiro Ishida, Makoto Shimojo and Tetsuya Watanabe, Screen reader using mouse with tactile display for blind, 5th Conference of the Virtual Reality Society of Japan, pp.477-478, Tsukuba, Japan, September 2000 (in Japanese).
Tetsuya Watanabe, Yuichiro Kume and Tohru Ifukube, Shape discrimination with a tactile mouse, Journal of the Institute of Image Information and Television Engineers, Vol.54, No.6, pp.840-847, 2000 (in Japanese).
Tetsuya Watanabe, Tetsuo Tamechika and Tohru Ifukube, Exploration of the lines displayed by a tactile mouse, International Conference on Presentation and Blindness, San Marino, May 1998.

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