SmartSlate: Rethinking tactile interfaces for the Blind

In today's elementary education landscape for the blind, there exists little support for effectively visualizing concepts like figures, graphs, maps, terrains, shapes and the like. Moreover, pedagogy for the blind relies excessively on trained teachers. Current interfaces involve conversion of text to Braille (Tactile Feedback). Only text being translated however, is insufficient for a comprehensive learning experience. This paper describes a solution for this issue by introducing a redesigned low-cost tactile interface called the SmartSlate that will complement classroom education and serve as a partial substitute. The SmartSlate will support terrain and geographic projections, reiterative learning processes and educational games to enforce effective learning. As a proof of concept, an application that teaches coordinate geometry has been developed to work with the SmartSlate. This idea was well received at the Roman & Catherine Lobo School for the Blind, Kadri, Mangalore, India where our experiments will be conducted.