The Design and Evaluation of the Compasses Devoted for Visually Impaired People

• Main Authors: Tsung-Jui Chung, 鍾宗叡
• Other Authors: Young-Hsiang Tu
• Format: Others
• Published: 2008
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/72063932616164340031

碩士 === 大同大學 === 工業設計學系(所) === 96 === In the task of drawing pictures, the people have to apply their hands to feel the drawing. To have a clear tactile response is a critical function to a drawing tool devoted for blind persons. This study focused on designing a compasses tool for blind persons to utilize the sense of touch in the task of drawing circles. There were two pilot studies conducted in this study, the first one was to compare the compasses (CR1) mostly used by the blind users with a conceptual tool (CR2) designed in this research. The result showed that although the CR2 had the significant less operating time than CR1, it had the larger deviations at fixing the centerpoint and drawing the arc. Another concept was proposed to improve this situation which was to build a gear as the head of the compasses. And another pilot study that was to test what kind of gear had the better performance on the circle-drawing tasks was conducted. In this second pilot study, there were 7 different gear-heads tested with 3 different kinds of drawing papers. And it was found that the gear 2, which was 8 teeth, was the best one within the 7 types. A new creative compasses (CR3) was designed after the two pilot study, and a complete balanced experiment with four tasks was conducted to see the differences within those three compasses (CR1, CR2, CR3), for which 10 blind children were recruited from the school for visual impaired children in Taipei. The MANOVA test was employed and it was found that CR3 was significantly better than the other ones at the mean task time, and also at the arc deviation, dynamic centerpoint deviation, and the total deviation. The conclusion is that the CR3 is better than the CR1 and CR2, which means the new creative compasses has the better performance on the tasks of drawing circles for the blind people.