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Photo note: To download a photo of BATS team members discussing the technology with Morris, see the bottom of release

Students develop digital map system for the blind; Microsoft provides research funding

By ANGELA SPIVEY
UNC Research and Graduate Studies

CHAPEL HILL -- Using an ordinary computer keyboard, touchpad and stylus, Jason Morris navigates a map of the British Isles in Roman times.

When his stylus hits the ocean, he hears the sound of waves. When he touches land, horses’ hooves thunder. As he moves over a landmark, a computerized voice speaks and spells the landmark’s name.

Morris, a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill graduate student in classics, is blind – but an inventive new software technology allows him to explore maps that would previously be inaccessible to him. Five UNC undergraduates in computer science have created software called the Blind Audio Tactile Mapping System, or BATS, which can help visually impaired people use maps.

The work has provoked considerable interest within the research division at Microsoft Corp., where officials recently announced the corporation is providing an unrestricted financial gift to support further work by the programmers and Morris through the coming academic year, working under the supervision of Dr. Gary Bishop, associate professor of computer science, and Tom Elliott, director of the Ancient World Mapping Center in the College of Arts and Sciences.

Microsoft also has made another gift to the department of computer science to help Bishop develop ways to enrich the undergraduate computer science curriculum with hands-on training in accessibility issues and technologies.

Maps provide special information that is difficult to receive any other way. But most maps aren’t accessible to people with visual impairments. Getting the software to work with the British Isles map took a semester of work.

Braille maps exist, but can include only a small fraction of the information found on conventional maps. And there isn’t a standardized tactile way of signifying features such as bodies of water, said James Kessler, director of UNC’s Disability Services.

Morris knows this problem firsthand. When he came to UNC and began working in the Ancient World Mapping Center, he and Elliott wanted to make parts of the "Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World" (edited by Dr. Richard Talbert, professor of history) accessible for visually impaired college students. The atlas includes 175 pages of full-color maps, none of which could be used by visually impaired students and researchers.

Meanwhile, Bishop was looking for a way to use his computer-graphics knowledge to help people with visual impairments.

After meeting Morris on a campus sidewalk, Bishop suggested that a group of students work on an interface for part of the atlas as their project for a computer science course taught by Dr. Kye Hedlund, associate professor of computer science. Undergraduates Shawn Hunter, Thomas Logan, Chad Haynes, Elan Dassani and Anthony Perkins began working with Morris on the map of the British Isles.

Their completed project helps Morris explore a map that wouldn’t be available to him otherwise. Right now, the software provides feedback only via sounds. The next step – and, with hope, this summer – is to add more ways of exploring the map, such as a haptic, or touch, interface.

The BATS group is interested in designing a program that could be used to explore any type of map with little programming. The team, under the direction of Bishop and Elliott, will expand the Blind Audio Tactile Mapping System to work with map materials in Scalable Vector Graphics form and to incorporate other historical maps and the UNC campus map.

Kessler is interested in the potential of the technology the BATS team has created. And Toby Considine, a technology staff member in UNC’s Facilities Services, said that if the university could leverage the right technology, Facilities Services potentially could update a map once, and that information could be automatically transmitted to a variety of devices: Web browsers and hand-held communication devices, to name a few.

People with severe visual impairments could conceivably walk into a campus building and immediately get information about the layout of the building and services offered there. Or a blind student who needed to find an unfamiliar building could download a map that could be read by an audio-tactile device.

Realizing these goals will require a lot of work, the securing of additional funding and a short wait for the technology to become standard. But the students are committed.

"We want to build a foundation now to make something that can be extended and create an application that has far larger implications than what we are able to do this summer," said Hunter.

For more information on the BATS project, click on www.cs.unc.edu/Research/assist/bats/. For more information on the Ancient World Mapping Center, click on www.unc.edu/awmc.

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Photo URL: http://www.unc.edu/news/pics/research/bats072502.jpg

News Services contact: Deb Saine, (919) 962-8415