A study of collaboration via a digital space accessible to adolescents with visual impairment

Aurélie Vallée (1) , Katia Rovira (1) , Loïc Deschamps (2)

1 PSY-NCA - Psychologie et Neurosciences de la Cognition et de l'affectivité
2 COSTECH - Connaissance Organisation et Systèmes TECHniques

The aim of this study is to observe whether the improvement of tactile digital space allows the visually impaired adolescents to interact and collaborate. A total of 12 participants (average age: 14 years 9 months) have to interact in pairs through a tactile device and have to solve a common task in a shared digital space. Contextualization of the environment and two sorts of tactile stimulation are proposed to the participants. The results and a semi-structured interview show that the subjects were able to set up an effective collaboration (strategies for following each other), which were facilitated by tactile feedback incorporating a degree of "parallelism" which makes it possible to perceive the direction of the movement of the other subject.

Keywords: collaboration; educational support; sensory substitution; visual impairment; Adolescents

Domains: Humanities and Social Sciences; Psychology; Cognitive science; Psychology

Aurélie Vallée, Katia Rovira, Loïc Deschamps. A study of collaboration via a digital space accessible to adolescents with visual impairment. British Journal of Visual Impairment, 2016, 34 (1), pp.83 - 90. ⟨10.1177/0264619615612525⟩. ⟨hal-01930834⟩