Abstract
Several Japanese cosmetic companies provide information of makeup to visually impaired persons by their web site, Braille leaflets, or seminars. However, from our result of questionnaires carried out on 25 visually impaired women, we found that the provision of information is not sufficient. They feel uncertainty to their makeup and there is a need to a system that support teaching and checking the makeup. We have been developing a prototype of a makeup support system and until now, a fundamental image processing method, information providing and teaching function for how to apply makeup, and a user interface for visually impaired persons have been built into the system. The usability assessment for the provided information and teaching function were carried out by 8 visually impaired women in the age group of 20 to 70 years. The result showed that the developed system achieved a high score on factors related to the content of information. However, only two testers could achieve relatively high scores on the performance test and operability needs to be improved further for other users in order to ensure that they can use the system quickly and easily.
