Assistive Technology for Special Needs
Visual impairment can affect a student’s ability to learn since their concept development when interacting with educational material is being limited. Learning activities based on images and visually rich content are mainstream learning methods, where facilitating students with visual impairments for engaged learning can be challenging. For comic books, which have shown promising results in engaged student learning, this problem is more severe. To overcome this challenge, this research presents a novel voice synthesised learning method to reduce the gap between the learning experience of a student with visual impairments compared to a mainstream learning activity. Utilising comic books, the proposed technique and the tool developed extracts semantic content, stores them in a database, and generates an audio stream in multiple languages on the user’s demand. To assess the usability of the system, a survey for a selected set of students with visual impairments was carried out. Furthermore, a concept-mapping approach was used to analyse the feedback given through the open-ended questions. From the analysis, key concepts with an emphasis on positive emotions, willingness to try again, and features to be improved, were identified.
