Earticle

While tools exist for blind people to understand shapes, these are not commercially available nor affordable and often require the assistance of sighted people. Thus, we designed two low-cost grid-based tactile tools using toggle buttons (TogGrid) and cotton balls (CottonGrid). To assess the potential of these as an educational tool, we conducted a user study with 12 people with visual impairments where they were asked to understand and reproduce shapes under different conditions. Although CottonGrid is relatively cheap and easy to make, findings show that TogGrid was perceived to be better in terms of perceived easiness, task completion time, accuracy, and preference in general. Particularly, participants valued TogGrid for enabling them to identify and correct errors. Based on the findings, we provide implications for utilizing toggle buttons for designing educational instruments for learning and expressing shapes for blind people.

Human-centered computing (HCC) as a field was defined several years ago. Since then, the Web has grown significantly, and so has its impact in society at every level, creating the grounds for a new Web science. In this paper, we examine the definitions of HCC and Web science, and discuss how they might be related. On the one hand, HCC can be viewed as a set of methodologies, and on the other hand, Web science can be viewed as a platform or repository, from which behavioral data can be drawn. We examine the relationship between the two, and summarize three different research approaches that in many ways show this intersection.