In her lab, Professor Hayes is working on tangible interfaces for blind
people that focus on interactions based on an augmented sense of
touch. Instead of using a screen reader to describe a visual interface,
which makes technological interaction difficult for the blind, one of
her projects in this area focuses on the development of a motorised
virtual scroll bar. Among other things, this scroll bar gives different
levels of resistance depending on the size of a document. “So, if it is a
short document, [you feel] light resistance, and you can pull quickly
down,” she explains. “Longer documents have more resistance so it
feels like the scroll bar is bigger than it is.”

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