Evaluation of Recognizing Tactile Pictures in Different Size Display in Sighted and Blind People

Abstract: The real world is always impact the blind people with objects they hardly known. Owing to the defective vision of the blind people, all of the shape of man-made things can only be detected by the tactile sensation. Within the major essences of product design: shape, size, scale, texture, position, and color, the blind people can reach all of the information except color by their tactile sensation. Base on our earlier research of relative works, few works mentioned about the way of how to integrate those essences of product design into objects for the blind people to use properly. This research focused on some of the factors of design: shape, size, and scale, trying to find out the effects of using the different shape / size / scale of tactile pictures in sighted and blind people. The result showed there were no significant differential on the recognition time and the rate of accuracy between the blindfolded people and blind people on recognizing all of the tactile pictures. There were some interesting findings on the rate of accuracy on recognizing true-size tactile pictures. All of the subjects had better performance on recognizing the true-size tactile pictures than 2 times or 1/2 times pictures, by the 76 % against 61 % of accuracy rate, in significant differential. This illustrated the shape of object we used on tactile picture should be about size of the real world. In the conclusion, some suggestions had been made on the design of tactile pictures for some further applications such as tactile product manual, tactile map, tactile graph card for teaching, and tactile brand card. Key words: blind people, blindfolded sighted people, tactile picture. 1