Abstract:

There are many apps for iOS, Android and Windows devices that help blind and visually impaired people to convert text to speech, to find something, to identify colours... Blind and low-vision pupils can easily have access to internet-enabled devices such as smartphones and tablets and therefore to use those apps at school. These apps can enable or make it easier to carry out experiments in the science laboratories.

This presentation collects some readily available free apps (Seeing AI, Envision AI, Lookout-Assisted vision...) that can be found on the web today for the inclusion of blind and visually impaired people in everyday life. It shows some examples of how they can be used to expand the number of experiments that blind and low-vision pupils can conduct more autonomously in the science laboratories. The use of these apps would not only be useful in laboratories for this type of pupils, but also for students with other disabilities (e.g. dyslexic or other print-disabled pupils).

Apps can help, among other things, in "reading" a practice script, a label or an electronic screen, in detecting changes in colour, recognising laboratory material, etc. The work also address the differences in teaching students with different abilities (blind, low vision, dyslexic...).

The experiments presented in this communication have been tested in schools with blind and low vision pupils. Likewise, in the framework of the Erasmus+ project “STEAM in the secondary school with no barriers for blind and visually impaired pupils”, the experiments have also been tested with pupils who are not visually impaired but who wore a blindfold with the aim of making the latter aware of the difficulties encountered by the former in their experiential learning.

Acknowledgements:
The authors thank the financial support provided by EU (Erasmus+ project No. 2021-1-ES01-KA220-SCH-000024569).

Keywords:

Blind and Visually Impaired, Inclusion, Stem, Laboratory Practices, Mobile and Tablet Applications.