Summary: Today, persons with a visual impairment use a cane to explore their surroundings and sense objects in their vicinity. While electronic aids have been proposed to aid them, they communicate limited information or require a fixed position. We propose VibroVision, a vest that projects information about the area in front of the wearer onto her abdomen in the form of a two-dimensional tactile image rendered by an array of vibration motors. This vest enables the user to sense features such as shape, position, and distance of objects in front of her.

Keywords: Spanish sign language (LSE) / Speech generation from LSE / LSE corpus / Sign editor / LSE translation / Driver's license renewal

Summary: This paper describes the development of a Spoken Spanish generator from sign-writing. The sign language considered was the Spanish sign language (LSE: Lengua de Signos Española). This system consists of an advanced visual interface (where a deaf person can specify a sequence of signs in sign-writing), a language translator (for generating the sequence of words in Spanish), and finally, a text to speech converter. The visual interface allows a sign sequence to be defined using several sign-writing alternatives. The paper details the process for designing the visual interface proposing solutions for HCI-specific challenges when working with the Deaf (i.e. important difficulties in writing Spanish or limited sign coverage for describing abstract or conceptual ideas). Three strategies were developed and combined for language translation to implement the final version of the language translator module. The summative evaluation, carried out with Deaf from Madrid and Toledo, includes objective measurements from the system and subjective information from questionnaires. The paper also describes the first Spanish-LSE parallel corpus for language processing research focused on specific domains. This corpus includes more than 4000 Spanish sentences translated into LSE. These sentences focused on two restricted domains: the renewal of the identity document and driver's license. This corpus also contains all sign descriptions in several sign-writing specifications generated with a new version of the eSign Editor. This new version includes a grapheme to phoneme system for Spanish and a SEA-HamNoSys converter.