An Intelligent and Interactive Interface to Support Symmetrical Collaborative Educational Writing among Visually Impaired and Sighted Users

Mirza Waqar,Muhammad Farhan,Muhammad Aslam

doi:10.3390/sym11020238

Abstract

It is often uncomfortable for disabled individuals, especially those with vision impairment, to conduct educational activities in collaboration with people that have perfect vision. This can be because of the former’s lack of confidence, vision capability, and acceptance. Information and communications technology (ICT) has played a vital role in giving support to people with visual impairments so that they can overcome their issues. This study proposes innovative solutions that address the challenges faced by partially or completely visually impaired people. It provides an interactive and intelligent interface, which they may use to perform educational activities, such as editing, writing, or reviewing documents, in collaboration with people without visual impairments. The system provides high-quality awareness features by sending them instant voice notifications about the actions and events occurring in the shared environment. A speech-recognition engine has been integrated into the system to allow users to interact with the application through voice commands. The system is evaluated through experiments, where people with visual impairment and people without visual impairment were engaged in collaborative writing. The obtained results are encouraging. The users showed curiosity in the system and were able to focus on the productive task instead of their disability.

Highlights

It is worth mentioning that more than 253 million people are visually impaired according to the World Health Organization (WHO) [1]
The results show that the participants rated the interaction and collaboration factors almost the same, but for coordination, awareness, and recommendation, they preferred WCFB over the Google Doc user interface (UI)
The paper summarizes recent developments of document building tools and applications designed for users with visual impairments, who have very limited special functions that restrict them from fully utilizing all the available features of an application

Summary

Introduction

It is worth mentioning that more than 253 million people are visually impaired according to the World Health Organization (WHO) [1]. Given that they make up a substantial part of society, it is imperative to ensure that they may actively participate in social activities/kinetics and interact with others effectively. Existing information and communications technology (ICT) tools have been designed for users with normal vision. In order to interact with this kind of application, users with such a disability employ assistive technologies and add-ons, such as a braille translator, voice recognition tools [2], speech synthesizers/screen readers [3,4], and so on

Methods

Results

Conclusion