AN INITIAL STUDY OF ENABLING VISUALLY IMPAIRED PEOPLE’S CHINESE TYPING SKILLS THROUGH USE OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES

Visually impaired people are disadvantaged learners due to congenital or acquired impairment of the critical visual learning channel. Although the advancement of the information technology (IT) and network have provided plentiful online resources and visualized learning materials for people to learn conveniently, those are not workable for the visually impaired people. The purpose of this study aimed to overcome this predicament by trying to help visually impaired people take advantages of the prevailing IT through integrating well-designed technology and courseware in Taiwan through several phases. To address this issue and help the visually impaired learn better through the empowerment of the information technology, in the first phase, a special cloud-based Visually Impaired People (VIP) E-learning Platform along with a specific course on Chinese typing approach entitled Boshiamy were designed and implemented for blind learners in the hope to help them achieve higher accurate typing rate as well as more Chinese literacy acquisition. In order to encourage more participation, in the second phase, we have promoted our VIP and Chinese typing course in cooperation with the Society of the blind people and organized a Chinese typing contest for the targeted learners. In the third phase, we would like to investigate the visually impaired people’s learning results by examining their Chinese typing performance in the contest to understand to what extent the information technology could empower visually impaired people by analyzing the accuracy rate and speed of their typing and searching the designated information online. There are 15 visually impaired people participating in this contest, their age ranging from 12 to 57. All of the enrolled participants have used the VIP E-learning platform. The results of Chinese typing contest show that 86.6% of participants reached 90% accurate typing rates, and 73.3% of participants even reached their typing accuracy higher than 95%. In other words, after using the course and the VIP platform, most participants could achieve literacy ability as well as the sighted people. In terms of typing speed, the results indicate that the top participants have achieved to type 66 Chinese characters per minute with 95% typing accuracy. Amazingly, this typing speed record is already better than the average typing speed of the sighted people.Overall, the results of this study reveal that the visually impaired people could learn Chinese typing well through the sound courseware design and the specific VIP platform to improve their typing accuracy as well as enhance their Chinese literacy and performance in searching the desired information online. Significantly, the participants gave highly positive feedback to the courseware and the VIP platform. In addition, they suggested more courses should be offered in the near future to benefit the visually impaired learners in terms of empowerment of their Chinese typing accuracy and speed as well as increasing their Chinese literacy power.