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An Approach of Supporting Access to Educational Graphic of the Blind Students Using Sound and Speech

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Part of the book series: Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing ((AISC,volume 1026))

Abstract

The access to graphical educational materials is very difficult issue particularly for the blind students. To solve this disadvantage, different methods such as braille printed drawings or swell paper are used. There are often expensive and time-consuming. As an alternative approach we offer method of audio and speech synthesis access to education graphics. In our solution appropriate sound signals and the synthetic speech descriptions are generated from graphic files saved in SVG format. The proposed method was implemented as a simple web application. It allows the teacher to prepare audio-labelled maps of countries and students to explore such maps. The student can listen to sound signals and descriptions representing object such as rivers, towns, when he/she slights his finger across the screen. The method was tested by few blind students. Tests have shown that the method makes the educational materials possible to prepare without using an expensive equipment.

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Correspondence to Dariusz Mikulowski .

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Mikulowski, D., Salamonczyk, A. (2020). An Approach of Supporting Access to Educational Graphic of the Blind Students Using Sound and Speech. In: Ahram, T., Karwowski, W., Pickl, S., Taiar, R. (eds) Human Systems Engineering and Design II. IHSED 2019. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 1026. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27928-8_46

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