Development of Tactile Graph Generation Web Application Using R Statistics Software Environment

Tetsuya WATANABE  Kosuke ARAKI  Toshimitsu YAMAGUCHI  Kazunori MINATANI  

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Information and Systems   Vol.E99-D   No.8   pp.2151-2160
Publication Date: 2016/08/01
Publicized: 2016/05/06
Online ISSN: 1745-1361
DOI: 10.1587/transinf.2015EDP7405
Type of Manuscript: PAPER
Category: Rehabilitation Engineering and Assistive Technology
Keyword: 
blind people,  tactile graphs,  R statistical software,  Web accessibility,  tactile legibility,  

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Summary: 
We have developed software that uses the R statistics software environment to automatically generate tactile graphs — i.e. graphs that can be read by blind people using their sense of touch. We released this software as a Web application to make it available to anyone, from anywhere. This Web application can automatically generate images for tactile graphs from numerical data in a CSV file. It is currently able to generate four types of graph — scatter plots, line graphs, bar charts and pie charts. This paper describes the Web application's functions, operating procedures and the results of evaluation experiments.