VoiceDraw: A Hands-Free Voice-Driven Drawing Application for People With Motor Impairments
By Harada, Susumu; Wobbrock, Jacob O.; Landay, James A.; ASSETS 2007 - The Ninth International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility, pp. 27-34Publication Date: October 15-17, 2007
Overview of VoiceDraw, a voice-driven software application that enables the generation of free-form drawings without manual interaction. VoiceDraw was designed and built to investigate the potential of the human voice as a modality to bring fluid, continuous direct manipulation interaction to users lacking the use of their hands. The VoiceDraw screen area consists of a status bar with a canvas area below it, and a translucent help overlay showing the valid speech commands within the current context. The software incorporates the Vocal Joystick engine for 2-D control of the paint brush and discrete sound recognition for mode switching. The engine continuously processes a user’s vocalizations and recognizes the corresponding vowel sounds, moving in the direction of vowel sounds for as long as the user continues vocalizing. VoiceDraw was developed using 5 field sessions with a self-proclaimed “voice painter,” whose current tools provided limited results in fluidity, paint-stroke quality and expressiveness. Two tasks, direct (i.e. target copying) and undirected painting, were performed by the “voice painter” to assess the usability of VoiceDraw. Subsequently, 99 people tried the application at a public exhibit, demonstrating that it can be used with minimal training for creative self-expression.
Published by: Association for Computing Machinery (Website:http://www.acm.org)
SIGACCESS (ACM Special Interest Group on Accessible Computing) (Web Site: http://www.sigaccess.org )
