Smart university: Software systems for students with disabilities

Abstract

Smart universities, smart classrooms and smart education are the wave of the future in a highly technological society. One of the distinctive features of a smart university is its ability of adaptation to and smooth accommodation of various types of students/learners such as regular students and life-long learners, in-classroom/local and remote/online students/learners, regular students and special students, i.e. students with various types of disabilities including physical, visual, hearing, speech, cognitive and other types of impairments. This chapter presents the outcomes of an ongoing research project aimed at systematic identification, analysis, and testing of available open source and commercial text-to-voice, voice-to-text and gesture recognition software systems—those that could significantly benefit students with disabilities. Based on obtained outcomes of completed research and analysis of designated systems we identified and recommended top text-to-voice, voice-to-text and gesture recognition software systems for implementation in smart universities.