Classroom Visual Assistant: A Tool to Help Visually Impaired Students See Lesson Material in the Classroom

Abstract

Visually impaired students may experience difficulty with seeing the board during class. Existing strategies and tools to overcome this difficulty fail to provide students with an efficient, convenient, and self-reliant solution to this problem. This thesis details the design, development, and evaluation of a mobile technology-based personal assistive tool to help visually impaired students see the board during class. This tool, called the Classroom Visual Assistant, is designed to be inexpensive, versatile, and convenient to acquire and use. It makes use of a student’s personal mobile devices to automatically capture images of the board, process them to make text on the board easier to read, and present them to the student so that they can read the text up close. We evaluated the viability of the Classroom Visual Assistant in helping students see the board, and the results demonstrate that this tool can be a convenient, versatile, and effective assistive tool for visually impaired students in the classroom.