Abstract
Visually impaired children mainly depend upon hearing and touch in the absence of vision. Smartphones are now relatively cheap and are in widespread use in almost all parts of the world, including by many people who do not have access to laptops or desktop machines. Smartphone-based applications provide a learning environment in which visually impaired children can enhance their educational skills in a similar way to other students. This paper introduces an artificial intelligence-based interactive learning platform that can enhance the mathematical skills of visually impaired children. This platform can assist teachers in the classroom to provide accessible and interactive materials to their visually impaired students. The proposed platform uses text-to-speech along with vibrotactile and auditory feedback to help visually impaired students arrive at a better understanding of mathematical material. Four participants were recruited to evaluate the prototype of this interactive learning platform. The results showed that understanding of mathematical content in visually impaired children was significantly improved. Furthermore, problem-solving skills and action awareness were enhanced with the help of a multimodal feedback approach. Participants also reported high levels of satisfaction with the proposed design. The paper concludes with a discussion of possible directions for future research aimed at overcoming barriers to learning faced by visually impaired children.
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This publication has emanated from research conducted with the financial support of Science Foundation Ireland under Grant number 18/CRT/6222.
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Shoaib, M., Jiang, S., Jin, L., Fitzpatrick, D., Pitt, I. (2023). An Artificial Intelligence-Based Interactive Learning Platform to Assist Visually Impaired Children in Learning Mathematics. In: Stephanidis, C., Antona, M., Ntoa, S., Salvendy, G. (eds) HCI International 2023 Posters. HCII 2023. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1833. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35992-7_51
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