Projects

Tactile graphics use raised lines, textures, and elevations to provide individuals with visual impairments access to graphical materials through touch. Tactile graphics are particularly important for students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, where educational content is often conveyed using diagrams and charts. However, providing a student who has a visual impairment with a tactile graphic does not automatically provide the student access to the graphic's educational content. Instead, the student may struggle to decipher subtle differences between textures or…

Recent workshop:

Workshop on Environmental Sensing Technologies for Visual Impairment (ESTVI '13 in San Francisco)

ESTVI '13 focused on emerging technologies capable of sensing environmental features for applications in access technologies for persons with visual impairment, including low vision and blindness. The development of environmental sensing technologies (ESTs) and the study of their potential to support the activities of daily living for visually impaired persons is progressing at a rapid pace, and engages many disparate research fields, including computer vision, wearable sensors…

The Computer Vision Journal Club meets periodically to discuss papers on topics in computer vision, machine learning and other topics of interest such as assistive technologies for persons who are blind or visually impaired, dual sensory loss (hearing and vision loss), neuroscience and psychophysics. All are welcome to attend.

This project has developed a system to give accessibility to blind people.

The purpose of this research study is to test subjects who have various hearing and vision problems on their lipreading, visual and auditory skills in order to understand the relationships between lipreading and visual impairment. We then can explore training strategies to improve auditory and visual communication.

This vision test shows random word sequences that prevent the prediction of upcoming words by linguistic criteria and is simple to score in a clinical setting.

It combines the standardized format of the MNread test with sequences of random words and letters, like in the Pepper test. We have used this test on hundreds of patients with maculopathies and on healthy subjects to measure their reading speed and register errors.

Reading speed was always higher for continuous text than for random word sequences, even in normally sighted subjects. The number of errors made was always higher than for…

The Macular Mapping Test (MMT) is a tool for the assessment of the topography of vision. It is a quick and low-cost alternative to conventional perimetry in practical low vision care.

While standard perimetry uses a detection task, the MMT measures the recognition of single letters in the center and near periphery (+/- 10 deg) of the visual field. Their sizes increase according to eccentricity and can be shown at different contrast levels. Each letter is displayed only for a brief moment (250 ms). One test run of 36 trials takes only about 3 minutes.

We have tested patients with early age…

Patients with spots of diminished or no vision (scotomas) often do not realize the nature of their deficit. This technique can help patients to heighten their awareness of scotomas.

In the process of learning eccentric viewing, several stages have to be passed:

1. Patients use their own hand movements to find the location of best vision in the visual field of one eye, while the other eye is closed and gaze is fixed.

2. Patients use eye movements to adjust gaze so that a target in a stable location looks best.

3. Coordinate eye and hand movements, so that a magnifier can be moved where it is…

Diminished motion perception was used as indicator of early effects of eye diseases in the periphery of the visual field. We investigated whether subtle defects in patients with age-related maculopathy (ARM) can be found in regions of the retina that lie outside the macula, i.e. 10 deg eccentricity. The results showed that such defect can indeed be found. Bottom line: Early ARM already affects areas of the retina that do not belong to the macula.

Purpose -To study the dynamic visual field characteristics in age-related maculopathy (ARMD) we measured motion sensitivity, double-pulse resolution…

We developed software to make the retinal placement of stimuli during micro-perimetry by a scanning laser ophthalmoscope (SLO) independent of involuntary fixational eye movements. This greatly increases the accuracy of the measurement and enhances the ability to reliably repeat a measurement on the same patient, as well as making comparisons between patients.

Reference

MacKeben M & Gofen A. (2007) Gaze-contingent display for retinal function testing by scanning laser ophthalmoscope. J Opt Soc America A, vol. 24/5, May, pp. 1402-1410 (feature issue on “Retinal Imaging”)

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