Abstract:

Vision plays a significant role in our daily lives since it impacts in almost all facets of life such as employment, recreation and education. Furthermore, it is said that 80% of learning comes from visual stimuli [1]. Globally, out of the 7.7 billion of population, 2.5 billion people are estimated to suffer some kind of vision impairment [2]. The World Health Organization lists poor vision among top three leading causes of disabilities in the world, and the people suffering it requires eye care and other services that entail large investments from governments and citizen’s funds.

Vision impairment is represented by a spectrum of concerns, from poor vision to complete absence of the ability to see. In addition, there are other vision-related conditions such as color blindness, that affects the way a person perceives the colors. All of these impairments negatively affect access to learning, as mentioned before. The lectures in schools, high schools and universities around the world rely on slides and whiteboards that teachers use to explain and convey information. And it is essential to be able to properly see and understand them correctly. Nonetheless, the visually challenged are unable to do so.

Therefore, we propose a piece of software that provides a set of tools for visually challenged individuals to access the slides and the whiteboards, as well as any other kind of visual information in class. Particularly, we intend to use a regular color camera aimed at the whiteboard or projector screen. Projector screens and whiteboards should have a set of markers at their corners that are used to detect their boundaries. The software we created includes tools for the visually challenged to view information: a configurable magnifier with different zoom levels, text recognition capabilities to export text to other apps for later use, text-to-speech conversion for those who cannot see at all even with accessibility tools, and different color blindness modes, among other utilities. Laboratory tests conducted with subjects simulating different visual conditions showed that our proposal helped them to better process the visual support information delivered in class and improve their learning process.

References:
[1] Eyeglasses for Global Development: Bridging the Visual Divide. Accessed 17 September, 2022. Retrieved from https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_2016_EYElliance.pdf
[2] A worldwide vision for tackling eyesight problems. Accessed 17 September, 2022. Retrieved from https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/01/a-clear-vision-for-tackling-eyesight-problems/

Keywords:

Visually-challenged persons, accessibility, OCR, computer vision.