Slate master: a tangible Braille slate tutor for mobile devices

Abstract

The development of the information technologies has benefited education through the integration of technologies and didactic tools to ease and enhance the education experience in and outside of the classroom. After a survey in several welfare centers, it was revealed that the visually impaired community has yet to benefit from the technology integration. In this work, we introduce Slate Master, a mobile device didactic tool for the visually impaired designed to ease learning how to use the Braille slate. The Braille slate is a tool used by the visually impaired to manually write Braille encoded text on paper. Slate Master is composed by a Braille tutor mobile application and a custom input interface that mimics the use of the Braille slate. We also present the insights obtained from a preliminary study performed with six Braille education experts that led to the design and development of Slate Master.