E-slates for blind students The low cost gadget helps students For 90% of the 191 million blind in India, who so far could not afford education because of expensive software or slow methods of teaching, this could be good news. Qa cost-efffective E-slate called Braille Writing Tutor (BWT) has been developed as part of an ongoing effort to disseminate the technology in developingcountries like in India. The researchers at Carnigie Mellon University in collaboration with Mathru School For Blind in Bangalore, have successfully tested the feasibility of the E-slate that was presented at the second International Conference on the Information and Communication Technologies for Development last week. “this particular E-slate costs around rs1500/- whereas the devices available in developed countries cost between rs15000/- and rs 1 lackh. And this is a low power and a robust device,” said Tom Steepleton, one of the researchers of the project. “The E-slate mimics a regular slate and stylus and interfaces with a computer running the software tutor. The tutor minitors a student’s writing and provides immediate audio feedback using text-to-speech synthesis that is tailored to the skill level of the students. It not only introduces the students to new concepts of learning but also enhances existing skills. It can also act as a diagnostic tool to help to identify some challenging areas for the student,” explained Stepleton. The students learn dots, practices dots, letters, words, sentences and numbers and mathematical calculations. “A student can learn through the E-slate independently, as the software introduces a series of exercises on basic Braille writing curriculum. For instance, if a student writes “a” incorrectly, the tutor assigns more exercises to practice “a”. if performance drops below threshold level, the voice freminds of how to write that letter by speaking a sequence of dots. This addresses the problem of shortage of trained teachers,” Stepleton described. In developing countries, Braille is always written with a slate and stylus. Using these tools, Braille is written in reversed, from right to left, so that the page can be read from left to right when flipped over. “for blind students learning to write Braille in the reverse manner can be a formidable process. They must learn mirror images of all letters, wich doubles the alphabet letters. Feedback is delayed until the paper is flipped over and then read, so it may take significantly longer to identify mistakes and correct them. And the students may not be able to receive individual attention and guidance needed to learn. The E-slate solves all these problems,” he said. thanks, mukesh jain.
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