BrailleBuddy: A Tangible User Interface to Support Children with Visual Impairment in Learning Braille

Abstract

Learning to read Braille is crucial to academic success for people with blindness or severe visual impairment. In our work, we investigate how we can support early learning of Braille with tangible computing. In a human-centered inclusive design process with interviews, six design iterations with prototypes, and feedback from experts, students, and teachers, we created BrailleBuddy. BrailleBuddy is a tangible user interface supporting children with visual impairments in learning Braille. We evaluated BrailleBuddy in a user study with children with blindness. Our results show that BrailleBuddy provides intrinsic motivation for learning Braille and can be used by children without supervision. BrailleBuddy complements the educational program as it allows children to play with and explore Braille characters at their own pace, thus lowering the challenge of learning to read Braille. In addition, an open-source toolkit is provided to enable educators and researchers to support individual requirements.