An Approach to Teaching Blind Children of Geographic Topics Through Applying a Combined Multimodal User Interfaces

Dariusz Mikulowski

Abstract: Nowadays all pupils have easy access to different kinds of educational games that use images, sound and video. Despite the rapid development of computer technology the blind children meet a great restrictions with access to this type of content. The main reason may be that the producers do not perform accessibility requirements by their games. Otherwise, it is not cost-effective to create specifically tailored multimedia learning materials for the blind. Then there is a great need to better sharing of multimedia educational content for this group of users. In this paper, an approach consisting in the replacement of images and video in usual educational game through a combination of audio recordings, synthetic speech, sound signals, electronic Braille, and convex graphics is proposed. An example of such interfaces was implemented as an educational audio game European Encyclopedia of Geography for the Blind that was developed for commercial sale.