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Tactile Media Design and Distribution

Keywords: accessible design tools,  communities of practice, inclusive design education, language to touch, multimodal analysis, tactile art, tactile graphics, tactile education, tangible and embodied interaction, user-centered dataset creation, vision-to-touch

Research Statement:  Alternative media in the form of tactile media make art, diagrams, graphics, illustrations, and maps are created to ensure visual information is accessible to people who are blind. All the while, blind and sighted people make tactile artifacts for communication purposes and personal expression. However, many people who are blind have never seen tactile media or engaged in their own design practices due to: 1) a lack of tactile media available and effective distribution channels, 2) a lack of design curricula and stable guidelines, 3) social stigma of touch and fear of conspicuousness, etc. 

Aim:  My goal is to identify and address the problems of practice that inhibit people who are blind from gaining access to tactile media and design education. Moreover, I hope to guide the development of accessible design tools and tactile interfaces, develop tactile media datasets and taxonomies, create just in time tactile media delivery methods and tactile highlights, design and implement inclusive design education, and cultivate a community of practice towards these ends.

Approach: I conduct interviews, user experience investigations, cultivate research-practice partnerships, and conduct design-based implementation experiments. I work closely with design researchers, computer scientists, blindness advocacy organizations, rehabilitation centers, teachers, artists, museum curators, librarians. 

Contributions: This work makes novel contributes to scholarship on Tactile Literacy, Tactile/Haptic Design,  Touch User Interface, User-Centered Data Science, Accessible AI, Computer Vision, Access Computing, and Human Computer Interaction. 

Funding and Collaboration:  National Science Foundation and the Center for STEM Learning.

Publications:

Stangl, A., Cunningham, A., Blake, L. Yeh. T. (2019). Problems of Practice Impacting Inclusive Tactile Media Consumption and Production. ASSETS 2019, Pittsburg, Pennsylvania.

Suzuki, R., Stangl, A., Gross, M. D., & Yeh, T. (2017, October). FluxMarker: Enhancing Tactile Graphics with Dynamic Tactile Markers. In Proceedings of the 19th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (pp. 190-199). ACM.

Stangl, A., Hsu, C. L., & Yeh, T. (2015, October). Transcribing across the senses: community efforts to create 3D printable accessible tactile pictures for young children with visual impairments. In Proceedings of the 17th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers & Accessibility (pp. 127-137). ACM.