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Presentation
Information Technologies for Visually Impaired People
Introduction to Assistive Technology for the Blind
The two fundamental problems facing blind people are
the difficulty of knowing where they are and getting about,
and the impossibility of having direct access to information,
whether in written or in electronic form.
The evolution of assistive technologies for the blind saw
a boom at the end of the last century, opening the doors to
exciting new prospects for the present day.
Several articles of this monograph look at the current
situation and the research outlook for these issues. In this
introduction we will take a historical look at the evolution
of assistive technology for the blind from the 18th century
to the end of the millennium in the hope that it will help
readers have a better understanding of this monograph .
According to the World Health Organization (WHO),
blindness is a visual acuity of 20/400 or 0.05% in the better
eye and with the best possible correction. The problem of
helping the blind to integrate in everyday life has been addressed
in some way or another since time immemorial. But
where once only the most basic form of aid or merely com-
The Guest Editors
Jaime López-Krahe is Chair Professor and Dean of the faculty
of Mathematics, Computing and Information Science and
Technology of the Université de Paris 8. He has authored about
a hundred publications. His research work is focused on image
analysis, form recognition, discrete geometry, Hough
transformation, etc., and their application in the world of the
disabled. Since 2001 he has promoted and directed the first
Master in “Technology and Disability” at the Université de Paris
8..
Josep Lladós-Canet received his degree in Computer Sciences
in 1991 from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya and his
PhD in Computer Sciences in 1997 from the Universitat Autònoma
de Barcelona (Spain) and the Université Paris 8 (France). He is
currently an Associate Professor in the Computer Sciences
Department of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and a staff
researcher of the Computer Vision Center, where he is also the
deputy director. He heads the Pattern Recognition and Document
Analysis Group (2005SGR-00472). His current research fields
are document analysis, graphics recognition, and structural and
syntactic pattern recognition. He has headed a number of Computer
Vision R&D projects and has published several papers in national
and international conferences and journals. J. Lladós-Canet is an
active member of the Image Analysis and Pattern Recognition
Spanish Association (AERFAI), the Spanish chapter of the IAPR,
and is currently chairman of the IAPR-ILC (Industrial Liaison
Jaime López-Krahe
passion was offered, now a more autonomous concept of
life for the visually impaired is pursued.
The greatest problems facing the blind to acquire this
autonomy and their solutions fall into two main categories:
The possibility of getting around independently; in
other words, mobility and navigation aids.
Access to written information and the social memory.
This includes accessibility to digital information on computers
by means of specialized digital interfaces.
1 Mobility Aids
The White Cane
Apart from those natural human aids (or rather guides)
popularized in Spain by the fictional character Lazarillo,
the first technical and intuitive aid is the simple stick. It
allows the user to explore the cone of space within its reach
although it cannot detect obstacles above ground level (overhanging
or projecting objects, etc.) while hazards caused
Committee). Prior to that he served as chairman of the IAPR TC-
10, the Technical Committee on Graphics Recognition, and he is
also a member of the IAPR TC-11 (reading Systems) and IAPR
TC-15 (Graph based Representations). He serves on the Editorial
Board of the ELCVIA (Electronic Letters on Computer Vision
and Image Analysis) and the IJDAR (International Journal in
Document Analysis and Recognition), and is also a PC member
of a number of international conferences. Josep Lladós-Canet also
has experience in technological transfer and in 2002 he created
the company ICAR Vision Systems, a spin-off from the Computer
Vision Center, specializing in Document Image Analysis, after
winning the Catalonian Government’s entrepreneurs award for
business projects involving Information Society Technologies in
2000..
Dominique Archambault has a PhD in Computer Sciences and
is an Associate Professor at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie,
Paris. Since 1996 he has been working in the field of assistive
systems for visually impaired people. He focuses on projects
concerning non visual interfaces, Web accessibility, and
educational tools for blind children. One of his main topics of
interest is the way in which computer technologies can be used as
a tool for children’s development, particularly in the case of visually
impaired children with additional difficulties (problems arising
from their visual impairment or additional disabilities). He has
coordinated 2 IST European projects (TIM - IST-2000-25298 and
Vickie - IST-2001-32678). .
4 UPGRADE Vol. VIII, No. 2, April 2007 © Novática