Using touch sensors and audio to help the visually impaired

An article describing the hardware and firmware of this project is published in the May 2012 edition of Circuit Cellar, with code and circuit designs available from their ftp site. Details of testing are published in “Speech and Touch Enhanced Interface for the Visually Impaired” in the Journal of Assistive Technologies, Issue 3, 2013. A link to the academic article is here, however even I can’t access the pdf of the article as I don’t have a password for the journal, but you can read the abstract for free. Email me and I’ll send you the full article - don’t tell the publisher!

I added touch sensors that trigger audio tags to a few every day devices. This is to help someone visually impaired learn how to use a new device. Touching a control activates a voice tag that tells you what the button does - but before you push it. This is a simple idea, but I can’t find it done anywhere else. Let me know if you have come across it. The electronics that I used is explained on my web page here.

Since I developed the solution based on my custom made electronics presented below, an off the shelf touch sensor board that interfaces with an Arduino board became available. I ported the idea to the Arduino platform and wrote it all up here. The rest of this page deals with my custom made electronics.

Time marches on. In the years since I wrote the above paragraphs and the work below, a single board solution to the hardware I had to custom build has been produced by bare conductive. If you are looking to implement the ideas shown here, that’s the route I’d suggest. This technology didn’t exist when I did this work. I’m glad to see that it does now.

A Sony casette player was the first device that I enhanced. A 30 second YouTube video shows what I did:

[embed]https://youtu.be/Z98IRhTjz30[/embed]

Apologies for the voice - I recorded my own dulcet tones. For later devices, I used Google voice in Android to generate a more melodious voice.

I chose the cassette player as many of the visually impaired people that I consulted still use cassette tapes to listen to talking newspapers and books. Cassette tapes have the advantage of remembering where you stopped listening to them! Plus, they are easy to handle. All of the people that I tested with the audio enhanced cassette player found the audio tags useful for learning the layout of the player. But, as it is a fairly simple device with only six controls on the front, we found that people quickly memorised the layout of the keys, at which stage the audio enhancement became redundant.

So I modified a more complex device, a Roberts ecoLogic1 digital radio. The picture on the left below shows the front controls. You can see the fine laminated wire that I sewed through the buttons - this couples the user’s finger with the touch sensor control circuitry. The back of the buttons can be seen in the next picture. The fine wires are fed out of the case and connect to the touch sensor circuitry that I built here.