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Introduction to the ASSETS’15 Special Issue, Part 1

We are pleased to present three articles that are extended versions of conference papers presented at the 17th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS’15), which was held in Lisbon, Portugal, October 26–28, 2015. Authors of several top papers from the conference submitted manuscripts for consideration, which underwent a full review process for the ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing. The guest editor for this issue is Jeffrey Bigham (Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA), who served as Program Chair for ASSETS’15. In addition, Eelke Folmer (University of Nevada Reno, USA) served as an editor for several manuscripts considered for this issue to ensure that conflicts of interest were carefully managed throughout the review process. This issue includes the first three of these articles that have been accepted to this special issue of TACCESS. Additional articles based on ASSETS’15 papers may appear in a future issue of TACCESS. The journal editors thank the authors for their excellent submissions, and we also thank all of the reviewers for the journal who contributed their time and expertise to this process. The first article, “Mind Your Crossings: Mining GIS Imagery for Crosswalk Localization,” describes a novel method for identifying the location of crosswalks on street intersections, which can provide valuable information for blind users who are traveling in urban outdoor environments. The second article, “Design and Real-World Evaluation of Eyes-Free Yoga: An Exergame for Blind & Low Vision Exercise,” presents and evaluates a system for enabling yoga instruction for users who are blind or who have low vision. The system uses camera and depth sensors to identify the yoga body pose of the user and provides feedback on the accuracy of the user’s movements. The third article, “On the Evaluation of Novel Sonification Techniques for Nonnisual Shape Exploration,” introduces several sonification techniques to convey shape information nonvisually and evaluates them in a large-scale study. Results demonstrate differences between the techniques and show that participants can be effective in using them. The journal editors thank the authors for their excellent submissions, and we also thank all of the reviewers for the journal who contributed their time and expertise to this process.