Auditory feedback from tactile interrogation of two dimensional scene for visually impaired.

With the ever increasing availability of the internet and electronic media rich in graphical and pictorial information (for communication, commerce, entertainment, art, and education), it has been hard for the visually impaired community to keep up. We propose a non‐invasive system that can be used to convey graphical and pictorial information via hearing and touch. The main idea is that the user actively explores a two‐dimensional layout on a touch screen (with or without tactile overlay) with the finger while listening to spatially conditioned auditory feedback with unique sound assigned and each region representing an object. The proposed approach was successful in a range of tasks, from basic shape identification to perceiving a scene with several objects. While this can represent a revolution for the visually impaired population, sighted can also benefit from the technology in situations they are unable to utilize vision and in areas such as virtual reality, immersive environments, and medicine.