Supporting Cross-Modal Collaboration in the Workplace

We address the challenge of supporting collaborators who access a shared interactive space through different sets of modalities. This was achieved by designing a cross-modal tool combining a visual diagram editor with auditory and haptic views to allow simultaneous visual and non–visual interaction. The tool was deployed in various workplaces where visually-impaired and sighted coworkers access and edit diagrams as part of their daily jobs. We use our observations and analyses of the recorded interactions to outline preliminary design recommendations for supporting cross-modal collaboration.