[accessibleimage] Accessible Freehand Drawing

Hi, 

If you had an accessible freehand drawing tool what features would you like to 
see in it?  I've very recently finished a prototype freehand drawing tool
that allows a blind person to explore, create, and modify diagrams using haptic 
I/O, which is similar to tactile diagrams.  This piece of software does
*NOT* make a diagram accessible through speech, either through the use of a 
screen reader or by self-voicing, and I have no intention of making it do so. 

The software has a limited set of features at the moment.  It uses a single pen 
to draw, which is in the form of a freeform line, and only works with black
and white images; However, it has several advantages, namely, it uses the 
standard bitmap format and is allows for blind and sighted individuals to 
collaborate
on drawing tasks together.  The software has several features designed to 
enable this integrated collaborative approach: networking that allows many 
people
to collaborate together and a visual, as well as a haptic, user interface, both 
of which can be used separately or in combination. 

One feature I'm thinking of investigating is incorperating support for the 
Mimeo range of electronic whiteboards.  My hope in investigating this is that
including this, if possible, could really improve integration for blind 
students in a mainstream learning environment. 

At the moment this is only a research prototype, but your ideas are welcome.  
I'm hopefully going to begin making this publically available next year. 
The main reason for this delay in availability is that haptic hardware is still 
very expensive; however, this is planned to change next year with the release
of some low cost haptic devices.  As usual, this is a spare time project and 
the timline may slip on my part. 

Will

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