This work addresses visual content accessibility for blind and low vision communities through the lenses of technique development and community engagement with an overarching question of "How can we make tactile pictures more available?" This inquiry takes a participatory, action-based design approach to break this question down based on…

Virtual reality (VR) provides significant opportunities for students to experience immersive education. In VR, students can travel to the international space station, or go through a science experiment at home. However, the current tactile feedback provided by these systems do not feel real. Controllers do not provide the same tactile feedback…

In just a short time, mobile devices have revolutionized the way we access information and interact with each other. With an ever expanding list of sensors and features, these devices are also capable of reshaping our experiences with physical systems. Prior efforts to explore this potential of mobile devices have often considered traditional user…

Beside the main syndromes of socialization and communication for individuals with autism spectrum disorders, they also have impairments in motor skills, such as ball skills (catching and throwing) and postural stability (standing and walking balance). The main objective of this dissertation is to improve motor skills for preschooler children with…

Modern intelligent agents will need to learn the actions that humans perform. They will need to recognize these actions when they see them and they will need to perform these actions themselves. We want to propose a cognitive system that interprets human manipulation actions from perceptual information (image and depth data) and consists of…

Can action support cognition? Can direct touch support performance? Embodied interaction involving digital devices is based on the theory of grounded cognition. Embodied interaction with gestural interfaces involves more of our senses than traditional (mouse-based) interfaces, and in particular includes direct touch and physical movement, which…

This study evaluates the necessity of training multiple versus single manipulative-imitations per object in order to establish generalized manipulative-imitation. Training took place in Croyden Avenue School's Early Childhood Developmental Delay preschool classroom in Kalamazoo, MI. Two groups of 3 children each were trained to imitate in order to…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of an animated agent that provides instructional scaffolding strategies via a story mnemonic or cuing question with feedback versus instructional scaffolding strategies alone on student achievement of different educational objectives in multimedia learning. Specifically, the study investigated…