The one octave scale interface for graphical representation for visually impaired people

Protecting the lives and the rights of the impaired people and promoting their social participation is a paramount principle today. Especially for visually impaired people, mobility is important function for promoting social participation. To support their mobility, improvements on map usage and route recognition are indispensable. But visually impaired people have so many difficulties to read maps and to use spatial information in the field. Maps have been made in the past for visually impaired people but people felt uncomfortable using them. So we have been developing a new method which visually impaired people can intuitively recognize the map using audio and touch panels which are recently seen in PCs and smart-phones. The method is universal-designed to enable not only the visually impaired people but also the non-impaired people to enjoy using interactive digital map contents together. This paper introduces our recent progress about the method called the One Octave Scale Interface. The effectiveness of the interface was confirmed by doing experiments of graph and map recognition and a walking experiment after presenting route guide map.