A tangible interaction platform as concrete support for blind children literacy in Braille

Abstract

The supposition that the Literacy through the Direct Way Methodology (LDWM) will also fit the blind children’s context led us to take advantage of a PhD thesis that built a set of requirements for an application to help teachers and deaf students in this method’s activities. Our main objective was to investigate how a tangible interaction for blind children’s literacy should be. This goal was pursued mapping the set of requirements elicited for deaf children to the context of blind ones, through conceptual readings, a working process continuously close to a blind teacher - also a national reference in Braille literacy, and the searching for proper interface elements and interaction techniques for blind students placed in the reading and writing acquisition process. This paper describes the research path and the results achieved up to date.