TY - CONF A1 - Götzelmann, Timo T1 - SmartTactMaps: A Smartphone-Based Approach to Support Blind Persons in Exploring Tactile Maps T2 - Proc. 8th ACM International Conference on PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments N2 - Despite increasing digitalization of our society many blind persons still have very limited access to predominantly pictorial information such as maps. In this paper we introduce a novel approach to improve the accessibility of maps for blind users by utilizing the abilities of standard smartphones. A major issue of tactile maps is the limited discriminability of the humans' tactile sense. Textual annotation of maps is crucial, but adds much complexity to tactile maps. Additionally, only few Braille labels can be accommodated to maintain legibility. In our approach we link smartphones with adapted tactile maps which transforms the physical maps into interactive surfaces using both the tactile and the auditory modality. We integrate machine readable metadata into these maps which can be recognized by the smartphones' camera to immediately obtain detailed map descriptions from a free global database. During tactile exploration of the map, blind users can request auditory explanations by interacting with the mobile application. An experimental application and a user study demonstrate the feasibility of our approach. Y1 - 2019 UR - https://opus4.kobv.de/opus4-ohm/frontdoor/index/index/docId/575 UR - https://doi.org/10.1145/2769493.2769497 SN - 978-1-4503-3452-5 VL - 2015 PB - ACM CY - New York, NY, USA ER -