Bilingual e-Story Book for Hearing-Impaired Students (BeSH) Toward Sustainability Learning

Abstract

Bilingual e-Story book for hearing-impaired (HI) students (BeSH) is a development of specialized courseware to facilitate them in enhancing Bahasa Melayu reading and comprehension skills. This is due to their slow performance in understanding and independent reading that leads to less motivation and low academic achievement at school. To date, there is no Bahasa Melayu storybook in a multimedia application that comes with sign language assistance in Malaysian schools. Whilst Braille equipment is created for visually impaired (VI) students, this courseware is a novelty created for the HI students. The enhancement in teaching technique is much needed to increase their competencies in reading effortlessly and enjoyably. Thus, the objective of this project is to design new courseware based on the requirement of HI disability which is to assist the students with their first language. The theory used in this innovation is assistive courseware which is supported by the exclusive design of the courseware interface. The enhancement is based on the inclusion of bilingual methodology. The main language for the deaf would be the sign language while the second language is Bahasa Melayu (or other mother tongues). The project was assessed using Nielsen 10 heuristics. The data was collected from the experts who are the teachers in Sekolah Pendidikan Khas Kuala Terengganu and UiTM multimedia courseware lecturers. The result shows that the courseware has the possibility to increase the attention and retention of the students in their learning process. It is hoped that the results of this project would contribute to the improvement of interface design for HI multimedia courseware and increase the demand of usage and the sustainability of lifelong learning among hearing-impaired students.