Speech and web-based technology to enhance education for pupils with visual impairment

• Published in: Journal on multimodal user interfaces Vol. 14; no. 2; pp. 219 - 230
• Main Authors: Matoušek, Jindřich, Krňoul, Zdeněk, Campr, Michal, Zajíc, Zbyněk, Hanzlíček, Zdeněk, Grůber, Martin, Kocurová, Marie
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Cham Springer International Publishing 01.06.2020; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Caching; Computer Science; Education; Image Processing and Computer Vision; Impairment; Mathematical analysis; Original Paper; Signal,Image and Speech Processing; Speech recognition; User interfaces; User Interfaces and Human Computer Interaction; Visual impairment; Text-to-speech synthesis; Pupils with visual impairments; Educational technology interface; Improving classroom teaching
• ISSN: 1783-7677; 1783-8738
• DOI: 10.1007/s12193-020-00323-1

This paper describes a new web-based system specially adapted to the education of Czech pupils with visual impairment. The system integrates speech and language technologies with a web framework in lower secondary education, especially in mathematics and physics subjects. A new interface utilized the text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis for online automatic reading of educational texts. The interface provides several TTS voices, synthesized data caching, and automatic processing of formulas in mathematics and physics. The system was designed to enable teachers create and manage teaching materials. It also enables the pupils to view and listen to the read forms of these documents online. A school for pupils with visual impairment participated in the development and implementation of the system. After one year of using the system daily, the user experience and evaluation data were collected. The results indicate a positive reception and frequent use of the system as well as a preference over classical educational materials.