TY - CHAP A1 - Oumard, Christina A1 - Kreimeier, Julian A1 - Götzelmann, Timo T1 - Pardon? An Overview of the Current State and Requirements of Voice User Interfaces for Blind and Visually Impaired Users T2 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science N2 - People with special needs like blind and visually impaired (BVI) people can particularly benefit from using voice assistants providing spoken information input and output in everyday life. However, it is crucial to understand their needs and include them in developing accessible and useful assistance systems. By conducting an online survey with 146 BVI people, this paper revealed that common voice assistants like Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa are used by a majority of BVI people and are also considered helpful. In particular, features in audio entertainment, internet access, and everyday life practical things like weather queries, time-related information (e.g., setting an alarm clock), checking calendar entries, and taking notes are particularly often used and appreciated. The participants also indicated that the integration of smart home devices, the optimization of existing functionalities, and voice input are important. Still, also potentially negative aspects such as data privacy and data security are relevant. Therefore, it seems particularly interesting to implement offline data processing as far as possible. Our results contribute to this development by providing an overview of empirically collected requirements for functions and implementation-related aspects. Y1 - 2022 SN - 9783031086472 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08648-9_45 SN - 0302-9743 SP - 388 EP - 398 PB - Springer International Publishing CY - Cham ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Götzelmann, Timo A1 - Kreimeier, Julian A1 - Schwabl, Johannes A1 - Karg, Pascal A1 - Oumard, Christina A1 - Büttner, Florian T1 - AmI-VR: An Accessible Building Information System as Case Study Towards the Applicability of Ambient Intelligence in Virtual Reality T2 - Mensch und Computer 2021 N2 - Ambient intelligence represents a paradigm in which the user does not react to the environment, but vice versa. Accordingly, smart environments can react to the presence and activities of users and support them unobtrusively from the background. Especially in the context of accessibility, this offers great potential that has so far only been demonstrated for individual user groups. To overcome this limitation, we propose the automated, user- and context-related adaptation of the modality as well as locality of the representation of building information in the form of both an adjustable table as well as two displays on the basis of a prototype for a library information center. For being independent from material and regulatory restrictions and for better planability (especially with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic) we used in addition to the hardware components also a Virtual Reality simulation, which proved to be very useful. Further optimization and evaluation will be needed for a more in depth understanding and dissemination in the long run, yet our prototype aims to help fostering further activities in the field of ambient intelligence, accessibility and virtual reality as a planning tool. Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1145/3473856.3474032 SP - 597 EP - 600 PB - ACM CY - New York, NY, USA ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Oumard, Christina A1 - Kreimeier, Julian A1 - Götzelmann, Timo T1 - Implementation and Evaluation of a Voice User Interface with Offline Speech Processing for People who are Blind or Visually Impaired T2 - Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments N2 - Assistive technologies help blind and visually impaired people to manage their daily lives independently. However, they usually have to work with voice user interfaces to use smartphones and tablets. Tasks like managing the calendar, taking notes, or setting an alarm clock require reliable voice recognition, which entails online access for remote computing. However, apart from data privacy and security issues, an online connection is not available in any situation. In this regard, our paper develops and evaluates an offline voice user interface with offline speech processing. The voice assistant was tested with seven blind and visually impaired people. It was found that the assistant was very well received (i.e., pragmatic, hedonic, and general quality) and that no functional limitations could be perceived due to the offline data processing. Based on these findings, the scope of functionality and the level of detail of the evaluation can be extended further to adapt this technology for this specific user group and promote its dissemination. Y1 - 2022 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1145/3529190.3529197 SP - 277 EP - 285 PB - ACM CY - New York, NY, USA ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Oumard, Christina A1 - Kreimeier, Julian A1 - Goetzelmann, Timo T1 - Preliminary Analysis on Interaction Characteristics with Auditive Navigation in Virtual Environments T2 - Proceedings of the 14th PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments Conference N2 - As access to new technologies becomes increasingly less expensive and complex, technologies such as virtual reality (VR) are also becoming interesting and relevant for applications outside consumer entertainment. Especially with VR for blind and visually impaired people, VR can overcome the limitations of real-world environments (e.g., hazardous locations and reliance on sighted companionship for training) by virtually exploring its digital model using consumer hardware. In this context, we conducted two within-subject user study with 11 and 5 participants that were asked to learn and re-walk an audio-landmark enriched path in a virtual environment. Our results showed, that the ability to learn and re-walk an audio landmark-enriched environment using an auditive only locomotion interface is possible, but yet difficult. To be able to re-walk even a simple corridor entails a relatively big training effort, but distinctive structures are recognizable again. The results also indicated that the intuitive use of controller based locomotion brings advantages over a keyboard and mouse based approach. Furthermore, we discovered different characteristics of auditive navigation (e.g., walking zigzag, in circles or collision-oriented with regard to the rooms’ walls), encountered acoustic rendering problems in acute corners and were able to show a training effect when having trained a path within a virtual environment with respect to re-walking, both inside a virtual environment and outside to a physically re-walked path. This work underlines the feasibility, problems, but also chances of different locomotion implementations in VR and is intended to foster future work towards both technical and methodological optimization in this area. Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1145/3453892.3461654 SP - 514 EP - 520 PB - ACM CY - New York, NY, USA ER -