Towards a Smart Learning Application for Visual Impaired People

Abstract

Education is the key to the success of the development of a country. Worldwide we have many people with low-vision issues when we look at the statistic globally, especially in Germany. Low-vision people face a big challenge interacting with visual information, which impacts their learning process. That is why a device like Braille, a tactile code used by blind and visually impaired people, is created. It is a non-vision way of reading and writing texts system composed of dots which Blind people can feel by touching and can read it as well. Being able to read Braille for low-vision people will significantly impact them, as they will have the same access as sighted people. However, a lot of time, training, and assistance is required to read and understand it. It takes about four months to learn the uncontracted version and up to two years for the contracted. In addition, there need to be more resources and expensive costs for the resources available, which can vary between 500 - 2000 dollars [6]. With all these obstacles combined, it will be difficult for new learners, adults or child to master it very well. Therefore, effective training is required. In our century, new technologies made things to be accessible easily. In this case, screen readers, braille displays, and speech recognition help the low-vision interact with the smartphones like any other person. Applications like Braille Tutor [3], mBraille [5], E-Braille [1], and others support visually impaired people using Braille without difficulties. But most of them are limited to teaching only how to read and write letters. For instance, Braille Tutor teaches basic alphabets and how to read numbers. This application was developed by Anjana Joshi [3]. Suppose we take the example of mBraille [5], which helps low vision people write letters and practice them simultaneously by playing some game. In addition, the application was developed to learn other kinds of letters, like Bangla. We do have many of them, as we listed above, and they have existed for years. However, we need a generic platform that starts from the basic until the most challenging part, where the school children will learn from A to Z everything he needs to know about Braille by feeling it on their fingertips. So after analyzing that, we are discussing in this paper smart learning application which is an extension of our previous work done on D-Braille [2]. This effective and user-friendly mobile application will help visually impaired people read or write braille characters. But not only letters, we assist the low-vision in understanding how Braille works with the dots, then teach him to read letters, words, and numbers. A complete application like this is the first to our knowledge, so it is done by connecting the Braille keyboard with the mobile and starting from the lowest to the highest. We are first making the user familiar with dots on the Braille, recognizing them in their forms and patterns. This is done in a gaming format, making it more interesting and making them love it, as our target is mostly children. Then we move on with the letters. The low-vision must know how each letter is represented in Braille. With the help of the voice-over and an effective User Interface, the application will be easy for them. After learning the letters, a practice session is provided to them so that they can manage them well before moving on to the numbers, where knowing the letters will make it easier for them. Because as we know, numbers are a combination of dot 6 and one letter in computer braille system that is common is Germany in the context of assistive technologies, so knowing the letters and training them with the game of getting familiar with the dots will make it much easier for them. After every learning session, we have a practice session to ensure that they master it, so the same goes for the numbers and words, which they will practice after learning. In the end, the result we will get is that the User will know everything he needs to know about Braille and will promote more features compared to existing applications like the one mentioned above.