<Henry 01> Hi everyone, it’s the ITP Student team’s midterm report for the touchpad pro project. First, let me introduce our team members, I am Henry, and Cynthia and Yuan are also team members of our student team. We are very honored to have Dr. John Rizzo and CEO of TPP Foundation Daniel Lubiner as our mentors
Our Project Goal is to develop activities and templates for TouchPad Pro to interpret content including graphic recognition and elementary school education; by making interpretation activities, we could enable learners with vision disabilities to draw, design, and learn.
<Henry 02> After reaching out to Daniel, the foundation and CEO of TPP, we had the initial understanding of the present status of the product including the current market, competitors, and development prospects. We had also realized the application methods and target audience and discussed with Daniel the feasible project objectives and designs.
<Henry 03> At present, the product on sale in the market is the braille doodle pad. Its main function is to adsorb small balls through magnetic force, so as to help visually disabled people feel the original appearance of some simple graphics through touches, such as trees and houses. In this way, they can have a preliminary understanding of the size, proportion, and shape.
<Henry 04> There are some similar products on the current market which will be our competitors: the draftsman Blind and the existing doodle pads. The draftsman blind is designed for blind people, however, it is too expensive to purchase and apply in elementary school. The most common one we have used for testing is the doodle pads, Although it has a reasonable market price, the function is very limited due to the space between each point, and the general size of the pad; also, the magnetic balls are very easy to fall down.
<Henry 05> Currently, we followed the schedule and held meetings weekly with both group members and mentors, we shared our weekly updates and developed our project based on the mentor’s feedback and advice. In the third week, we have provided a template prototype by using cardboard and laser-cut to present our ideas of demonstrating simple shapes to elementary school kids who have disabilities in vision. Based on that, we set up our project direction to produce interactive and educational-used templates to present visualization graphs. Next, Cynthia will give you an introduction to our current templates.
<Cynthia 01>Based on our discussion, research and preparations, we made a design plan for the broad doodle templates. Our target users are elementary school kids with visual impairments. We want to help them learn about graphics and further data visualizations and our compositions. We also set several attributes to our templates. The first one is educational, because we always want the children to learn something from their experience with Braille doodles. The second one is geometric, not only because it is a foundation in their learning, but also, they are visually impaired children, so we want to make it simple and straightforward for them to learn. If we have more time, we will make it more artistic and creative. To start their braille doodle plus template experience, the children will need to first put their templates on their braille doodle pads, and then draw shapes by following silhouettes in the templates. When they put their templates away, the shapes will stay there, so they will learn about the shapes while touching. So this is more like a step-by-step tutorial telling the children what the geometric shapes feel like, and how to do the comparisons and how to put it into practical use.
<Cynthia 02> We also made a learning flow for the data visualizations path especially. So we made the design decision that the children will learn from simple shapes to a completed chart sample. So our first templates will be basic geometric shapes. there will possibly be a line, a triangle and a rectangle in the template, for children to learn what is what. And the second one is comparisons between two shapes. For example, we will put two rectangles in our templates and let the children learn which one is larger with which is smaller. And the third one is we want to put more shapes in the templates for the kids to do the comparison. And the fourth one is, we would like to add a x and y-axis to help the children learn some basic information about that. Then, we will put our basic shapes into the chart, also from two shapes to multiple shapes. And the final version will be a flexible template for data adjustments. Yuan will show us a detailed version we did in our prototype.
<Cynthia 03> This is our digital version sketch for the templates. This is the two-shape comparison sample. We can see there are two rectangles in different shapes and the left one is smaller while the one on the right is bigger. So we also add the braille words of small and big on the templates. And this one is a comparison between multiple shapes, we can see four rectangles. This is the x and y-axis. The children will learn from zero to seven on their x-axis and zero to five on their y-axis. And this is a completed chart with two rectangles on the x-axis. Yuan will show some sample prototypes we have made so far.
<Yuan 01 > So this is a prototype that we made a few weeks ago, we use cardboard to make the template. So we try out several basic shapes. First, the lines, rectangle and triangle. After testing out, we realize that actually there is a meeting point in a triangle. So, we realize that because of the thickness of the cardboard, it is actually kind of hard to draw them in a doodle pad. So we decided to change to another material in the next step.
<Yuan 02 >This is what we made this week. We decided to use two materials to separate the thing that can move or not, to help users to identify the differences. This is a template for users to draw graphs in the x and y-axis. In this video, you can see that users easily draw in the x and y-axis.
<Yuan 03 >So in the ideal way, we hope users can put out the cutout part, and they can adjust it into the place where they hope to place. In this video, you can see users easily draw the bar chart in the pad in a specific race. But we also realize there are some improvements we tested out, we realize that without the whole cover, it is not really stable. And it is not easy for users to pull out the things. So after the user testing, we think we need more things to do in the next step.
<Yuan 04 > After showing this prototype to the doctor Rozin, and Daniel, we might need to make several adjustments based on their suggestions, since they have more experiences with the people who have the low visions. Secondly, we will make a braille doodle in the template, which allows users to feel it, which one is x-axis and which one is y-axis and in a more specific way, they can feel the different numbers in the x and y-axis. Third, we’ll make a box for the graph which allows users to pull out. And lastly, if this is possible, we might do several user testing.
<Yuan 05 >First asked should we include a braille doodle on the top of the template or make it in the template as you can see in the image here, like one is making the braille to though, on the top of the template so users can use it in their hands to fill it. And in other way, if we make the braille doodle in the template, then users need to enjoy it first then they can feel it. And then the second is other than geometric shape, which can be used in the educational field by applying to the path? Thank you. 🙂