Nahar Lutfun, Jaafar Azizah, Ahamed Eistiak, Kaish A B M A
a Institute of Visual Informatics , Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia , Bangi , Malaysia.
b Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering , Khulna University of Engineering & Technology , Khulna , Bangladesh.
Assist Technol. 2015 Fall;27(3):172-82. doi: 10.1080/10400435.2015.1011758.
Visually impaired students (VIS) are unable to get visual information, which has made their learning process complicated. This paper discusses the overall situation of VIS in Bangladesh and identifies major challenges that they are facing in getting education. The Braille system is followed to educate blind students in Bangladesh. However, lack of Braille based educational resources and technological solutions have made the learning process lengthy and complicated for VIS. As a developing country, Bangladesh cannot afford for the costly Braille related technological tools for VIS. Therefore, a mobile phone based Braille application, "mBRAILLE", for Android platform is designed to provide an easy Braille learning technology for VIS in Bangladesh. The proposed design is evaluated by experts in assistive technology for students with disabilities, and advanced learners of Braille. The application aims to provide a Bangla and English Braille learning platform for VIS. In this paper, we depict iterative (participatory) design of the application along with a preliminary evaluation with 5 blind subjects, and 1 sighted and 2 blind experts. The results show that the design scored an overall satisfaction level of 4.53 out of 5 by all respondents, indicating that our design is ready for the next step of development.
视障学生在获取视觉信息方面存在困难，这使得他们的学习过程变得复杂。本文探讨了孟加拉国视障学生的整体情况，并指出了他们在接受教育过程中面临的主要挑战。孟加拉国采用盲文系统来教育盲生。然而，基于盲文的教育资源和技术解决方案的匮乏，使得视障学生的学习过程漫长且复杂。作为一个发展中国家，孟加拉国无法为视障学生提供昂贵的与盲文相关的技术工具。因此，针对安卓平台设计了一款基于手机的盲文应用程序“mBRAILLE”，旨在为孟加拉国的视障学生提供一种便捷的盲文学习技术。该设计方案由残疾学生辅助技术专家和高级盲文学者进行评估。该应用程序旨在为视障学生提供一个孟加拉语和英语盲文学习平台。在本文中，我们描述了该应用程序的迭代（参与式）设计以及对5名盲生、1名视力正常者和2名盲人专家进行的初步评估。结果显示，所有受访者对该设计的总体满意度为4.53分（满分5分），这表明我们的设计已准备好进入下一步开发阶段。
