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FLight: A Low-Cost Reading and Writing System for Economically Less-Privileged Visually-Impaired People Exploiting Ink-based Braille System

Published: 02 May 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Reading printed documents and writing on a paper pose a great challenge for visually-impaired people. Existing studies that attempt to solve these challenges are expensive and not feasible in low-income context. Moreover, these studies solve reading and writing problems separately. On the contrary, in this study, we propose FLight, a low-cost reading and writing system for economically less-privileged people. FLight uses ink-based Braille characters as the medium of textual representation. This helps in keeping a compact spatial representation of texts, yet achieving a low-cost status. Additionally, FLight utilizes a low-cost wearable device to enhance ease of reading by visually-impaired people. We conduct a participatory design and iterative evaluation involving five visually-impaired children in Bangladesh for more than 18 months. Our user evaluation reveals that FLight is easy-to-use, and exhibits a potential low-cost solution for economically less-privileged visually-impaired people.

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  1. FLight: A Low-Cost Reading and Writing System for Economically Less-Privileged Visually-Impaired People Exploiting Ink-based Braille System

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '17: Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    May 2017
    7138 pages
    ISBN:9781450346559
    DOI:10.1145/3025453
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    Published: 02 May 2017

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    Author Tags

    1. assistive technology
    2. braille
    3. economically less-privileged people
    4. wearable device

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    • (2024)A Large Vision-Language Model based Environment Perception System for Visually Impaired People2024 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)10.1109/IROS58592.2024.10801813(221-228)Online publication date: 14-Oct-2024
    • (2022)6 Years Later: Examining Long-term Project OutcomesProceedings of the 5th ACM SIGCAS/SIGCHI Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies10.1145/3530190.3534825(1-11)Online publication date: 29-Jun-2022
    • (2022)Systematic Literature Review on Making and AccessibilityProceedings of the 24th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility10.1145/3517428.3550377(1-5)Online publication date: 23-Oct-2022
    • (2021)HELF (Haptic Encoded Language Framework): a digital script for deaf-blind and visually impairedUniversal Access in the Information Society10.1007/s10209-021-00838-822:1(121-131)Online publication date: 28-Aug-2021
    • (2021)Braillestick: A Game Control Proposal for Blind Users Based on the Braille TypewriterEntertainment Computing – ICEC 202010.1007/978-3-030-65736-9_13(142-147)Online publication date: 5-Jan-2021
    • (2019)Investigating Feedback for Two-Handed Exploration of Digital Maps Without VisionHuman-Computer Interaction – INTERACT 201910.1007/978-3-030-29381-9_19(305-324)Online publication date: 2-Sep-2019
    • (2018)PINDOTSProceedings of the 2018 2nd International Conference on Education and E-Learning10.1145/3291078.3291106(41-47)Online publication date: 5-Nov-2018
    • (2018)Towards Devising a Low-cost and Easy-to-use Arithmetic Learning Framework for Economically Less-privileged Visually Impaired ChildrenACM Transactions on Accessible Computing10.1145/326575611:4(1-31)Online publication date: 16-Nov-2018

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