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Presenter(s)
Joshua A. Miele, Ph.D.
The Smith Kettlewell Eye Research Institute
2318 Fillmore St.
San Francisco, CA 94115
James R. Marston, Ph.D.
Department of Geography
3511 Ellison Hall
University of California at Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA 93106-4060
Summary: "The TMAP project provides educators, researchers and blind travelers with free downloadable tactile street maps of any location in the United States."
Introduction
Smith-Kettlewell's Tactile Map Automated Production (TMAP) Project is a web-based software tool for rapid production of highly specific, tactile street maps of any location in the USA. Prior to this time, tactile maps have been difficult and expensive to produce and obtain. Local street maps for any specific town or city have been almost impossible to obtain in an accessible format. TMAP brings together geographic information system (GIS) resources, computer-controlled embossing technologies and advanced algorithms for producing well-designed tactile graphics to automate this historically arduous process.
TMAP is available via an accessible Web interface. It is a revolutionary tool which promises to significantly impact education, orientation, and mobility of blind and visually impaired travelers by increasing access to information about the locations of places of employment, education and recreation. Maps are highly customizable to the needs and desires of the user. For example, TMAP can produce tactile maps on any one of several makes of Braille embosser, on any size paper, with labeling in Grade I or Grade II Braille, and with a variety of street labeling options. The web site keeps track of each user's preferred embosser type, paper size, etc., thus making specification of uniformly formatted maps quick and easy.
In addition to its anticipated practical benefits, TMAP is a powerful research tool. Many wayfinding and cognitive psychology studies have investigated the degree to which blind and visually impaired people are able to integrate spatial information obtained from tactile maps. In a collaboration between The Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute and the University of California at Santa Barbara's Department of Geography, TMAP is now being used to investigate spatial cognition related to visual impairment and tactile map usage.
Current Status of The TMAP Project
The TMAP web site is now up and running (http://www.ski.org/tmap) The underlying data used to generate the tactile maps is the U.S. Census Bureau's Topologically Integrated Geographical Encoding and Reference System (TIGER). This geographic information system (GIS) provides relatively complete and accurate location information for roads and many important landmarks in the United States and its territories.
Registered TMAP users are able to connect to the web site via the browser of their choice. The site is implemented in PHP and HTML, with no JAVA or client-side requirements. Thus, even a user of LYNX from a Unix shell could easily use the TMAP site. Users of graphical browsers such as Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator likewise find the site attractive and easy to use. The TMAP site is fully accessible with screen readers and other adaptive browsing options.
Each TMAP user has his/her own login and password. The site remembers each user's preferences and uses these settings as defaults. If a user wishes to change these preferences, it is easy to do so. In addition, the site keeps a record of previous maps made by that user. This enables a favorite or frequently used map to be quickly recalled and downloaded.
Current TMAP features include:
• user-definable map scaling
• customizable street labeling
• selection of Braille code
• user-definable paper size
• selectable embosser type
• map location based on a specific address
• map location based on a particular intersection
• selectable history list of previously downloaded maps
• context-sensitive help
Features Coming Soon:
Third-party Embossing -- The TMAP development team recognizes that not everyone has a Braille embosser available to them, although a growing number of individuals, schools and libraries are now using Braille embossers. For this reason, we will soon implement a feature that allows a user to send a TMAP to a third-party Braille producer to have the map embossed for them. The tactile map can then be sent to the user via postal mail.
Telephone Interface -- Just as Braille embossers are not universal, computer skills vary widely among blind and visually impaired users. We plan to have a telephone interface that parallels the web interface. Users will use voice or touchtone commands to request a map. The map would then be produced by a third-party and mailed to the user.
City Overviews, Highway Maps, and Larger Area maps -- The TMAP project has focused its attention on the production of small-area, local street maps, but there is also a need for maps that show larger areas. Such maps might show an overview of an entire city or town, showing major streets and landmarks. Other large-area maps might include highway networks and the spatial relationship of cities and towns to one another. There is no technical obstacle to implementing these types of maps and these features should all be available in the near future.
Interactive Tactile Maps -- Because minimizing clutter is such an important factor in the creation of readable tactile maps, only a few geographical feature types can be included on any one map. By using a simple tactile map as an overlay to a touch-sensitive surface attached to a computer, a much richer set of geographic information can be presented to the map user via audio or refreshable Braille. We are looking forward to enabling developers of such technologies to make interactive versions of our tactile maps.
Who Is Using TMAP
A number of blind travelers are now making regular use of TMAP. In general, prior to traveling to a new location such as a hotel in an unfamiliar city, the user downloads and emboss a map of the area around the hotel or showing other locations of interest. These can then be studied at leisure to help inform the traveler about the street layout in the area.
Teachers of Orientation and Mobility (O&M) are able to provide their students with high-quality tactile maps depicting locations of interest to the student. Many teachers of O&M use tactile maps in this way, but TMAP users can produce these tactile maps more quickly and easily, and with greater accuracy than ever before. Instructors using TMAP are now able to spend more time with their students that might otherwise have been spent in the process of map-making. In addition, some O&M instructors who admit to having previously avoided using tactile maps in their lessons, now find them more convenient to incorporate, thereby improving their effectiveness as instructors.
Program of Research
The Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute is collaborating with the University of California at Santa Barbara's Department of Geography to conduct an on-going set of studies using automatically produced tactile maps as research tools. The ability to produce a tactile street map of any location in the U.S., as well as flexibility of scaling, layout, and labeling, facilitates a number of areas of research that would have previously been difficult and expensive to undertake. For example, some rout-learning and rout-choice studies require subjects to read and answer questions about maps showing both familiar and unfamiliar areas. TMAP makes it possible to use a map of any location, including the subject's home or place of work. If these maps were being created by hand, the cost and labor associated with creating each special map would mean that only a small number of subjects would be able to participate. Using TMAP technology, we can include large numbers of participants, thereby making experimental results more statistically meaningful.
Similarly, the ability to resize a given map quickly and easily facilitates research on scaling and spatial cognition by allowing materials to be produced rapidly and permitting the inclusion of large pools of participants. The same is true of investigating different labeling schemes and their relative effectiveness. In short, the flexibility of the TMAP tool allows researchers to study aspects of tactile map reading with relatively large numbers of subjects - a luxury that has been largely unavailable until now. The flexible output of the automated tactile map-making process allows researchers to produce and compare several versions of the same map quickly, easily, and inexpensively.
In the presentation associated with this paper, Dr. Miele and Dr. Marston will describe the various studies being conducted in more detail. At that time, pilot data might also be available for presentation and discussion.
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