An Assistive Technology for Braille Users to Support Mathematical Learning: A Semantic Retrieval System

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Mathematical learning from digital libraries and the web is a challenging problem for people with visual impairments and blindness. In this paper, we focus on developing the mathematical learning skills of braille users with a new assistive technology developed to retrieve semantically mathematical information from the web. This kind of research is still in the study phase. This paper presents an overview of assistive technologies for braille users followed by a description of the proposed system, which works in four phases. In the first phase, we translate a query math formula in braille into MathML code, and then we extract the structural and semantic meaning from the MathML expressions using multilevel presentation. In the classification phase, we choose a multilevel similarity measure based on K-Nearest Neighbors to evaluate the relevance between expressions. Finally, the query result is converted to braille math expressions. Experiments based on our database show that the new system provides more efficient results in responding to user queries.