Projects

The Smith-Kettlewell Summer Institute program is a multi-year, learning opportunity designed to provide training for blind and visually impaired students, recent graduates, and early career researchers interested in data skills that will enhance Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) jobs within industry, government, non-profit organizations or academia. 

In today’s research climate, individuals are expected to have many skills at their fingertips. Often researchers are required to build software and hardware environments to run studies, to gather and analyze data and to prepare…

People with visual impairments increasingly rely on camera-enabled smartphone apps for tasks like photography, navigation, and text recognition. Despite the growing use of these applications, precise camera aiming remains a significant challenge. This project explores the impact of virtual reality (VR) exploration in the context of learning to use a camera-based app. So far we have studied this approach in the context of training a visually impaired person to use walk-light detector app at traffic intersections.