PRE2019 3 Group4 State Of The Art

State Of The Art

On this separate wiki page the State Of The Art (SOTA) regarding Braille teaching devices and methods to learn Braille are described.

Summary: The literacy rate of visually impaired people is decreasing, which poses problems with reading. This causes a gap of information to emerge amongst this certain target audience. Due to the lack of properly skilled braille teachers, this problem is hard to handle. When a braille teaching device is introduced on the market, it is mostly focused on the roman alphabet, not including other languages. Now an Arabic braille learning device is introduced that works with an Arduino Uno and miniature solenoids. Tests have only yet been performed with LEDs lighting up to represent the braille dots.

Summary: Braille teaching toys for blind or visually impaired kids are very limited. Therefore a 3D-printed braille puzzle for educational use has been developed. Fittle is based on fitting pieces of a braille puzzle on a certain place, and when it is correct, one is able to spell the braille word and feel the dots that the word denotes. The best results occurred after performing multiple runs with the Fittle.

Summary: Three visually impaired children were taught to make tactile discriminations of the braille alphabet within a matching-to-sample format. A braille character as sample stimulus was presented to the children, and they had to select the matching stimulus from a three-comparison array. To increase the ease of use, braille characters were divided in sets where there was a maximum difference between the braille dots of a stimulus. Over time the difficulty was increased, which also increased the braille level of the children.

Summary: This article is about everything that comes into play when teaching braille to children. There is not one proper way to teach braille to children, since there are a variety of braillists that need to be taught in a variety of contexts. Regarding the future, it is important to do further research in teaching braille and the literacy of the pupils.

Summary: Since there is a lack of assistive tools to learn mathematics, blind students in Bangladesh are still using outdated learning tools. A study has been performed to create an effective and affordable assistive tool based on the needs of the blind students learning mathematics. Interactive methods, such as hearing and touching, were an important criterion in the design. By performing empirical tests and evaluations with teachers, experts, and end users, the use of this novel design proved to be promising in practice.

Summary: Educational software for visually impaired students is widely available. However in the Bangla language there is a lack of proper braille teaching software that is affordable. The Bangla Braille Learning Application (BBLA) is a novel approach for low-cost braille teaching to visually impaired students. With vibrations and audio feedback, users get proper responses to their inputs.

Summary: This research is about an engaging co-design process to create a device to help visually impaired children to identify letters and short words in braille as a first step towards reading braille. Current barriers regarding braille teaching devices are accessibility, portability, durability, usability, and functions. A design has been tested in practice, with the feedback to add various learning modes, and the reduction of the size, weight, and cost of the design.

Summary: The first steps towards learning braille are line tracking, which is moving ones finger horizontally across a line until the line ends. Current methods for line tracking are incomplete, since these apply lines with small gaps between subsequent characters. This study focused on applying larger gaps between subsequent characters to increase braille reading mastery.

Summary: In the United States only 10% of the blind school-aged children learn braille due to the lack of teachers. Now gloves are introduced with vibrating motors at each knuckle and when one of these motors vibrate, the user presses the corresponding key. Audio feedback is given about what character was typed. By applying this method passively, one can learn braille via passive haptic learning.

Summary: Since the literacy rate among visually impaired people in many countries is very low, a braille learning device was developed that uses a braille keypad and microphone as input and produces speech and pins of a single braille cell as output.

Summary: Braille literacy has been declining mostly due to the use of electronic text and assistive software, such as screen readers. However Braille literacy is still the most empowering form of literacy for blind people. Therefore the research goal is to provide new tools to improve Braille literacy. First the problems with the nowadays used methods for learning Braille are stated. Next hardware and software tools for alternative Braille-based applications are shown/discussed.

Summary: Learning Braille requires the assistance of another person to help identify the correspondence between the Braille pattern and the character. To eliminate the need for assistance, a spoken dialogue system was developed that allows visually impaired individuals to self learn Braille.