Making Brainstorming Meetings Accessible for Blind Users

Co-located meetings, as a fundamental part of our professional and educational lives heavily rely on visual information. In such meetings visual information consists of a) the artifact or “content” part (as for instance in brainstorming meetings the mind maps) and b) of nonverbal communication elements (like deictic gestures and gazes). Blind persons to a large extent do not have access to these important aspects of information and communication which are only available via the visual channel. Personal support is considered to be the only viable solution, but can only be made available in exceptional cases. This puts blind people at a disadvantage. This paper presents first research results focusing on tracking, analyzing and representing non-visual information and communication elements to blind people to allow more independent access and participation in communication. We present a general system architecture as well as a prototype implementation presenting visual information also to blind users, so that the information gap between sighted and blind participants is reduced in co-located meetings. These activities form the basis for our future research activities on access to non-verbal communication for blind people.