[Promotion-technology] Fw: Talking Braille: A new tool to teach blind children

[Robert Jaquiss]

Hello Colleagues:

     I thought you might find this of interest.

REgards,

Robert

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "BlindNews Mailing List" <BlindNews at GeoffAndWen.com>
To: <BlindNews at FreeLists.org>
Sent: Thursday, October 11, 2007 7:50 PM
Subject: Talking Braille: A new tool to teach blind children


> SciDev.Net
> Thursday, October 11, 2007
>
> Talking Braille: A new tool to teach blind children
>
> By Supriya Kumar
>
> Learning Braille can be a formidable challenge in developing countries. 
> Supriya Kumar profiles a new device that's addressing the task.
>
> Imagine picking a hundred blind people at random from around the world. 
> Chances are that 90 of them would come from developing countries. Of these 
> 90, a large proportion would be living in poverty and only two would be 
> literate.
>
> At less than three per cent, the literacy rate among blind people in 
> developing countries is extremely low, even in comparison with the low 
> general literacy rate, which is 50 per cent in some countries.
>
> Often, parents do not see the value in educating their blind children. 
> Even if they do, children may not receive appropriate attention in 
> traditional schools. Very few teachers are trained to teach Braille, a 
> written language for the blind, in which letters are represented by a 
> group of raised dots that are felt with fingertips.
>
> But reading and writing Braille is important: it is very difficult to 
> learn mathematics orally, and Braille is important for the economic 
> independence of the blind.
>
> So researchers in the United States have developed a Braille 'tutor', 
> which tackles many of the issues faced by new Braille learners in the 
> developing world.
>
> The challenges of Braille
>
> Braille is written using an array of different tools, depending on the 
> available resources. In the developed world, Braille-writers use a six-key 
> typewriter called a Brailler. At US$600 dollars, these fast and 
> easy-to-use devices are too expensive for most in the developing world.
>
> Children in developing countries use a slate and stylus - a writing 
> utensil - to emboss Braille characters onto the back of thick paper. 
> Embossing a mirror image from right to left on the back of the page 
> ensures that what is written can be read from left to right when the page 
> is right side up.
>
> To be able to read and write Braille, children thus need to learn not just 
> each letter in the Braille alphabet, but also its mirror image. 
> Furthermore, feedback on whether they've written the characters correctly 
> is delayed until the page is flipped over. The entire process presents a 
> formidable challenge to young children learning to read and write.
>
> Another challenge for learners arises from the fair amount of strength 
> required to emboss dots onto thick paper using the stylus.
>
> "Weaker students and small children have problems learning braille," says 
> Gubbi Muktha, managing trustee of Mathru School for the Blind in 
> Yelahanka, near Bangalore, India.
>
> "The Braille slate itself is heavy for the weaker and smaller children. 
> Holding it is another big problem. In addition to this, holding a stylus 
> and putting pressure through it to get the print of the dot is even more 
> difficult."
>
> The electronic solution
>
> Nidhi Kalra, of TechBridgeWorld - a venture of the Carnegie Mellon 
> University in Pittsburgh, United States - that aims to develop and 
> implement technology to aid sustainable development around the world, 
> decided to tackle some of these issues.
>
> She asked Tom Lauwers, a fellow student at the Robotics Institute at 
> Carnegie Mellon University, if he knew anyone who might be interested in 
> building hardware that could be used with software she had written.
>
> Lauwers jumped at the opportunity and together they decided to produce a 
> robust, low-cost, low-power, electronic Braille tutor. They wanted it to 
> be something that could be used for a long time, whose parts were 
> available locally and could be replaced using local manpower.
>
> Their tutor - an electronic slate and stylus - uses affordable electronics 
> to track contact between the slate and stylus, and text-to-speech software 
> to provide immediate, audio feedback.
>
> Kalra and Lauwers are developing the first generation tutor in close 
> collaboration with the students and teachers at the Mathru School for the 
> Blind in India. When Kalra took the Braille tutor to Mathru for field 
> tests in the summer of 2006, the response she got was overwhelmingly 
> positive.
>
> Interactive learning
>
> Mathru is a residential school with 45 blind students and eight teachers, 
> six of whom are blind themselves. Kalra found that after six weeks of 
> using the Braille tutor, students who previously made frequent mistakes 
> started writing noticeably faster, with almost no mistakes.
>
> "Now the small children and weaker students of Mathru are happily learning 
> Braille as it is easy and also fun learning," says Muktha.
>
> Even students who were fluent in Braille enjoy using the tutor because of 
> the audio feedback. Overall, Kalra found that students and teachers seemed 
> to be writing much more.
>
> Based on feedback from teachers and students at Mathru, Lauwers designed 
> the tutor to feel like the slate the students are used to, by placing a 
> cut-out of a normal plastic Braille slate over the top of two rows of 
> Braille cells in the tutor.
>
> The stylus is also a normal Braille stylus, connected to the tutor by a 
> wire. In addition to two rows of 16 cells each, the tutor also has four 
> buttons that can be programmed so the students can interact with the 
> tutor.
>
> For example, one button mutes the speaker so that advanced users can write 
> without audio feedback; another button allows students to choose between 
> writing right-to-left or left-to-right.
>
> Each alphabet in English Braille is written as a set of six dots in a 
> cell. The tutor feeds back on both the dot sequence and the letter that 
> the sequence encodes, thereby reinforcing the sequence to the beginner.
>
> Further, the tutor provides this audio feedback as soon as the writer 
> touches the stylus to the slate, removing the need for strength that would 
> be required to emboss paper.
>
> The software for the tutor uses a digitised version of a Mathru teacher's 
> voice for audio feedback, as the children - especially the younger ones - 
> had difficulty understanding the American accent normally used in 
> text-to-speech software.
>
> The tutor can be tailored to address the specific needs of the student 
> based on their level of fluency in Braille. The tutor can be adjusted to 
> read out the position of the dots in the cell, the letter and - for 
> students well-versed with the alphabet - just the final word or sentence 
> they have written.
>
> The tutor has also been useful in diagnosing students' problems with 
> Braille. Mangala, a student at Mathru, always completely embossed all six 
> dots of a Braille cell before she started using the Tutor, suggesting that 
> she didn't understand the concept of Braille.
>
> But the tutor showed she understood the concept; her mistake was that she 
> wasn't moving from one cell to the next as she wrote the sequence of 
> letters. So, for instance, she would emboss dots one and three of a cell 
> for the letter 'k', and then, dots one, two, four and five of the same 
> cell for the letter 'n'.
>
> Her teachers, who are also blind, realised that this was the case because 
> the tutor would read aloud the letters she was embossing.
>
> Work is underway to produce the next generation of the tutor, which could 
> be tested later this year.
>
> Kalra found that students at Mathru were often scared of touching the 
> original stylus because of the wire that connects it to the tutor, so in 
> the new version of the tutor, the stylus interacts with the slate 
> wirelessly.
>
> Shivayogi Hiremath, an engineer who has undertaken a pilot project to 
> produce six tutors locally in Bangalore, says that mass production in 
> India will require some adjustments to the electronics design so that 
> locally-available materials can be used.
>
> "All details of hardware and software design will be made open-source. It 
> should, therefore, be fairly easy to adjust the design if need be, in 
> order to produce the tutor in large numbers," says Lauwers.
>
> Hiremath and Anil Biradar, an IBM (International Business Machines 
> Cooperation) employee in India, helped to get a US$1000 donation from IBM 
> for the Mathru School, so they can continue to explore local production of 
> the tutor.
>
> For now, the Mathru School has three tutors, and is expecting to have some 
> more available soon, thanks to the grant from IBM. Mathru also plans to 
> introduce and encourage use of the tutor among potential users outside the 
> school, once there are enough tutors available.
>
> All too often, technology used in developing countries is not designed 
> with the explicit needs of local people in mind. But the Braille tutor 
> appears to be a case of technology from the 'bottom up'. The need for the 
> Braille tutor existed, and Kalra and Lauwers are successfully providing 
> the technology to address that need.
>
> Supriya Kumar is a biologist and a freelance writer from Bombay, India, 
> currently working towards a degree in public health at the University of 
> Pittsburgh in the United States.
>
> Related links:
> TechBridgeWorld
> http://www.techbridgeworld.org/
>
>
> http://www.scidev.net/features/index.cfm?fuseaction=readfeatures&itemid=658&language=1
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