Tactile Interactive Multimedia computer games for visually impaired children (TiM) Project reference: IST-2000-25298

• France
  University Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris 6 (Co-ordinator)
  Les Doigts Qui Rêvent
  University of Le Havre
  BrailleNet

• Sweden
  University of Halmstad,
  Tomteboda Resource Centre

• United Kingdom
  Sunderland University
  Virtua Limited

TiM is a Research Project funded by the European Commission under the "Information Society Technology" Programme (IST), part of the European Union's Fifth RTD Framework Programme (1998-2002).

Key Action: KA1 (Systems and Services for the Citizen)

Theme: Persons with Special Needs (including the Disabled and Elderly)

Action line: Intelligent assistive systems and interfaces to compensate for functional impairments.

The overall aim of the TiM project is to provide young visually impaired children, with or without additional disabilities, with multimedia computer games they can access independently, that is without the assistance of a sighted person.     

EC Contribution: 1,540 K-euro

Coordinator: Dominique Archambault, Université Pierre et Marie Curie (France)

TiM project is a Research Project funded by the European Commission within the IST Programme.The aim of the TiM project is to provide young visually impaired children, with or without additional disabilities, with multimedia computer games they can access independently, that is without the assistance of a sighted person.

TiM project adapted game scenarios designed for the standard Multimodal interface to specific modalities used by visually impaired children using multimodal interfaces.and specific devices such as Tactile Boards and Braille Displays.

Objective of TIM project:

To develop software tools for game adaptation and design

To watch the children play

To prepare the effective dissemination of the tools and games developed

The overall aim of the TiM project is to provide young visually impaired children, with or without additional disabilities, with multimedia computer games they can access independently, that is without the assistance of a sighted person.

TiM developed tools that allow:

The adaptation of existing commercial computer games ensuring that educational and play contents are incorporated,

The development of specific contents meeting the particular needs of a young blind or partially sighted child.

• Persons with Special Needs (including the Disabled and Elderly) 
• Target users of TiM softwares
• The main group of children concerned is composed of children:
• blind or partially sighted (vision <0,05),
• from 3 to 10 years old,
• with or without slight to moderate additional disabilities.

• Technical
• Pedagogical

• Tactile Boards
• Braille Displays

The mainstream computer games are usually designed especially for being used through a standard Multimodal interface. Then the use of specific modalities implies that the displayed information should be converted in order to fit the specific presentation rules which are associated with these modalities.

The few examples presented here are using each a specific user interface (with a specific set of modalities). They are extracted from prototypes designed for the TiM project, in order to watch the children plays. Let us remind here that the objective of the project is to generalise this method in order to make games adaptable to user interfaces using several modalitie.

These games were adapted from CD-Roms published by Bayard Presse and the research work was done with their agreement.

The original games CD-ROM contains interesting sounds but the animations are purely visual ones and the child must use the mouse to navigate in the different parts of the game. Furthermore, the software is not compatible with magnification softwares, nor with screen readers.

À l'abordage, Pit !

Les saisons de Petit Ours Brun

Clic d'Api n°5

Projects Deliverables are PDFs downloadable forms of workshops and publications that can be downloadable from project web site: http://inova.snv.jussieu.fr/tim/tim-rub.php?ref=publis

• Les enjeux de l'ergonomie pour la conception d'interfaces adaptées aux personnes handicapées visuelles
  Aurélie Buaud, Benoît Roussel, Dominique Burger and Dominique Archambault
  Actes du 8ème séminaire CONFERE, "De la Conception des Produits et des Services Innovants au Développement Local et Durable", pp 226-232, Marrakech, Maroc, Juillet 2001
  LCPNI ENSAM Marseille, France.

• From Multimodality to Multimodalities: the need for independent models
  Dominique Archambault and Dominique Burger
  Proceedings of the UAHCI'01 conference "Universal Access in HCI - Towards an Informatino Society for All", pp 227-231, New-Orleans, United
  States of America, August 2001; Edited by Constantine Stephanidis, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

No downloadable games were available from web site.

There is some information about Multimodal Interfaces, screen shots of game examples, and infor about specific devices used.