MCSIG PROJECT
"McSig" is a multimodal, teaching and learning environment for visually-impaired students to learn character shapes, handwriting and signatures collaboratively with their teachers. It combines haptic and audio output to realize the teacher's pen input in parallel non-visual modalities. McSig is intended for teaching visually-impaired children how to handwrite characters (and from that signatures), something that is very difficult without visual feedback. We conducted an evaluation with eight visually-impaired children with a pre-test to assess their current skills with a set of character shapes, a training phase using McSig and then a post-test of the same character shapes to see if there were any improvements. The children could all use McSig and we saw significant improvements in the character shapes drawn, particularly by the completely blind children (many of whom could draw almost none of the characters before the test). In particular, the blind participants all expressed enjoyment and excitement about the system and using a computer to learn to handwrite characters.
Publications
Paper Publications
- Plimmer B., P. Reid, R. Blagojevic, S. Brewster and A. Crossan, Signing on the Tactile Line: A Multimodal System for Teaching Handwriting to Blind Children, Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI 2011), accepted, in press. Video clip
- Reid, P. and B. Plimmer (2008). A Collaborative Multimodal Handwriting Training Environment for Visually Impaired Students. OzCHI 2008, Cairns.
- Plimmer, B., A. Crossan, et al. (2008). Multimodal collaborative handwriting training for visually-impaired people. CHI 2008, Florence, Italy, p393-402. Video clip
Other Publications
- Reid, P. (2008). A Multimodal Collaborative Handwriting Training System for Visually Impaired Students. MEng Thesis, University of Auckland.