THE PROJECT PROPOSAL For E-Learning solution for visually impaired

Supervised By:
Dr.Shantha Fernando Ms. Sachini Weerawardhana

Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka.

Table of Contents

Introduction .. 02 Problem Description...... 02 Solution...... 03 Objectives.. 05 Scope of the Project... 05 Literature Survey 05 Requirements. 06 Timeline. 07

Title: - e-Learning solution for visually impaired

Introduction
With the explosive growth of information technology the internet becomes wider with information and more user friendly with the people. Internet is heavily used for various purposes over the world. Although the internet become matured still there are some problems remain with information accessibility on World Wide Web (WWW) for blind users as majority of websites are invaded by contents, both non-visual (audio) and visual (video & images). Accessibility measures in terms of a usable and blind-friendly websites should be made available to blind users. Here we are focusing on visually impaired students to access elearning sites like normal users. They can interactively command to navigate through the pages, download materials through voice and the web page is described through the readers after they log in as visually impaired users. Describing of the images, graphs, charts and tables and printing them in user sensible manner using low cost braille printer which is just used to print textual documents are another two major areas we are focusing here.

Problem Description
As this project is based on the requirement of the blind school at Rathmalana, we should consider their resources and requirements. According to their requirements we need to implement an e-learning system which can be accessed and understand by the blind students. Although there are some e-learning solutions for blind are available in the world, they just allow screen readers to read whatever the contents in the web pages. They just explain simple web contents or voice learning portals which can access web through voice calls (VoLe). In Sri Lanka there is no proper e-learning solution available with these requirements for the blind students. So our aim is to make such a system with enhanced features which can be accessible both normal and visually impaired people. Visually impaired learners need many helper applications and/or plugins to work with elearning systems. The idea is to extend already existing e-learning systems so that they can be used by both normal learners as well as visually impaired learners. Based on the type of the user if he is a blind person, additional requirements needed for him should be available.

The core issues of insufficiency of these applications are accessibility standards (provided by Web content), inefficient speech recognition engines in recognizing voice commands accurately. Web developers try to comply with the web accessibility guidelines without understanding the pragmatic requirements of blind users. The structure of the web pages is complex, and simple accessibility rules are not followed which results in web contents not being accessible by blind people. So the speak able system should have a better way of explaining complex web structures. Also there should be fast, clear and accurate voice recognition and respond system for the communication. The vision of a blind person relies on what hes hearing. So the reading of the web pages should be in an understandable manner. They should be able to easily give voice commands while the reading is happening and go back and forth through the web page as they want. The reader should read all the web content. Describing the graphs, charts, tables, equations and images in voice is also a major issue. Audio aids as well as specialised printing aids are necessary for describing the pages, give commands and print images. The braille emboss printers are much expensive. Printing an image from those printers also cost lot more than a normal braille printer. In our case Rathmalana blind school does not have embossed printers which are used by blind people in developed countries to print an image. Cost is also a factor to be considered. Also a method should be found to convert the graphs, charts, tables and equations in to a sensible manner (images in a textual format) to print as documents.

Solution
Solution for above problem is to improve an existing e learning systems in a way a blind In this case any type of user can log in to the system and if he is a blind person special features should be enabled so that they can also access the site. Page content is same for both users. Only the structure of the page is customized so that the web page can be read through a reader which can explain all the text documents, image captions, link descriptions and all. When the listener wants to do pause, stop, download, read next page or go to another link kind of commands he can simply command them pausing the web page reader. A good

speech recognition engine with a good vocabulary is necessary in recognizing voice commands accurately and quickly. Also need a good TTS engine which can be integrated to web to read the web pages. As an e-learning system can be accessed by both the students and the teachers, the teachers can upload the contents of the learning materials separately for the visually impaired students in the normal way. When they upload images, a description is asked to save with the image for the ease of blind students. Describing the graphs, charts, tables, equations and images also should be provided. Printing images, graphs, charts, tables and equations is another issue. Those things should be converted in to a braille format before printing. Since the cost attach with the emboss printing is pretty much high we have to convert our images in to a less detailed format which is sufficient to describe the image. Since Rathmalana blind school only have braille printers the image should be converted to a textual format so that the image can be printed using this braille printer. When we have images with textual contents blind person should be able to understand images and texts separately.

Objectives
1. To make the e-learning solution available to visually impaired people. 2. To make it user friendly and easy navigate through the site by voice commands. 3. Printing images from Braille text printers in a cost effective manner. 4. A way of converting images, graphs, charts, tables and equations in to a describable text when reading the web page.

Scope of the project

This e-learning solution should be available to both normal and visually impaired people. So the content and the structure must be same. If the users are visually impaired, their accounts enable the voice and speech tools. The user can navigate through web pages like a normal user by giving commands. The voice and the vocabulary can be pre-defined or we can use a small dictionary for that. The communication through the client and server with the commands should be fast. The reader should read the page while giving pauses in necessary

situations. Also the user can be able to participate forums, online quizzes and enrolments like existing e-learning systems through voice commands. Printing the images, graphs, charts, tables and equations from Braille text printers should be available. In that case image should be converted to a textual format so that in can be printed using a normal braille printer. For blind people since they cant see the images on a web page a description should be provided so that they can understand what the image is.

Literature survey
We looked at the existing e-learning solutions available for blind in the world. Some of them are commercial software and some of them voice browsers, read simplex forms of web pages or cant do voice recognition and respond parallel with the web reader. There need to be some enhancements in some of the systems and mostly it wont match our requirements in the blind school in Rathmalana. As we can observe the pros and cons of existing software, we can build the system with enhanced features which leads to good effectiveness. Our next step is to compare these systems and get the most efficient one to be enhanced. Since this is for an e-learning system we need to be look at the available open source elearning systems to integrate voice in to that. We looked at available methods to print images using braille text printers. In this case we found that we can convert the image to a textual format by considering each 3*2 pixel area in the image as a single braille character and mapping this character with characters supported by the braille standard use in the braille printer. So in this case we can find a braille letter for each 3*2 cell so that we can convert the whole image to a textual format. But since we need to resize the image to support the size of braille paper we may lose some information. Graphs, charts, tables and equations should print and also should be explained verbally. There is a research area to identify these kinds of things when the alternative texts are not provided.For voice response and recognition we are now doing researches to identify a best way to do that.