Tactile Maps

For blind and visually impaired people, it is difficult to access map data in their daily life. During my doctoral study, I designed and developed interactive audio-tactile city maps on touch-sensitive pin-matrix displays (HyperBraille Display), for a desk-top scenario and a mobile scenario. For the two scenarios, a large pin-matrix display with 7200 pins (120 x 60 pins) and a portable pin-matrix display with 960 pins (32 x 30 pins) have been used, respectively, to present OpenStreetMap based city maps. In addition to a series of tactile map symbols (e.g., buildings, bus stops) via raised and lowered pins, several map operations have been developed towards interactive city maps (e.g., panning, zooming and searching POIs). Besides, for the mobile tactile map system, user's position and heading orientation can be updated from GPS and compass data.

person responsible

Limin Zeng