Direct observation of tactile geometric drawing by visually impaired and blind students

Reading and drawing geometric shapes are challenging tasks for visually impaired and blind users. The development of a human-centered design solution to address these issues and simulate the techniques of tactile drawing requires a detailed understanding of the process. The objective of this study is to understand the method of reading compound shapes and drawing primitive shapes (triangle and rectangle) to help design digital drawing tool. We conducted a direct observational study of tactile reading and drawing tasks along with semi-structured interviews of 10 visually impaired and blind students. We analyzed the data through affinity analysis and identified a set of validation strategies for drawing and shape identification techniques for reading used by the participants for error prevention and recovery. We present the findings in detail and discuss them in this paper. We believe that the findings will help designers, developers, and researchers to design technology-based interventions for non-visual drawing.