SBIR Phase I: Development of a Multimodal Interface for improving independence of Blind and Visually-Impaired people

The broader impact/commercial potential of this project will be to promote empowerment of millions of blind and visually-impaired (BVI) people by enabling greater independence, supporting increased educational attainment, proliferation of vocational opportunities, and enhancing their overall quality of life. There are currently no commercial solutions for providing BVI users with an assistive technology (AT) solution that allows BVI users to seamlessly access textual and graphical information via a unified system. Towards meeting this greater goal, this Phase I SBIR project addresses key challenges relating to technical feasibility in creating the core algorithms of Midlina and the functional viability proving that BVI users will find practical utility in its application. By providing a much-needed AT solution leveraging touchscreen devices such as smart phones as a platform (which is already owned and used by more than 80% of BVI users), this project has a high probability of user adoption and market acceptance when commercialized. Given that vision loss is expected to double in the next 20 years owing to age-related eye diseases experienced by the rapidly aging population, this project will have significant economic benefits for the State/Federal agencies providing support services to BVI and aging population. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will show that a novel touchscreen-based information access software, called Midlina, will allow blind and visually-impaired (BVI) individuals to independently access textual and graphical information from digital media. The key innovation and strength of the proposed solution is in its ability to achieve this convergence of seamless text and graphical information access by integrating with native mobile operating systems (OS) used on smart touchscreen-based devices, the fastest growing computational platforms among BVI users. This project builds on strong theoretical underpinnings derived from 5-years of NSF-sponsored academic research involving hundreds of human testers and represents an excellent translational path towards commercialization. Two objectives will drive this Phase I project: (1) Developing a novel visual-to-multimodal conversion algorithm that is seamlessly integrated with a native mobile operating system, and (2) Establishing technical feasibility and practical usability of a prototype system through rigorous human user testing. A successful outcome of this Phase I project would lead to: (1) development of core algorithms for a novel touchscreen-based information access software, called Midlina, and (2) demonstrate feasibility that Midlina will enable BVI people to independently access both textual and graphical contents from digital media. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.