Automatic Generation of Tactile Graphics of Characters to Support Handwriting of Blind Individuals

For blind individuals who wish to live independently, this study develops an automatic generation tool for tactile graphics of characters. The tool is developed by using the tactile graphics production system BPLOT. The tool generates character images from fonts installed on Windows, extracts the contours of these images, and outputs a figure-drawing program for BPLOT from the coordinates of those contours. In addition to choosing a typeface of characters, character spacing and arrangement, users can also select whether to apply the thinning processing to character images. The evaluation of the tactile graphics of characters was conducted with blind university students as experimental participants. All participants rated the material with Kaisho (regular script) typeface subjected to the thinning processing as having the highest readability.