Development of Graphical User Interface (GUI) for Teaching Braille in Class for The Blind People

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Surya Dharshan s/o Surash, Shaharil Mad Saad, Wan Aliff Abdul Saad, Muhammad Danial Abu Hasan, Zair Asrar Ahmad, Mohd Azwarie Mat Dzahir

Abstract

Assistive technology is crucial to ease the teaching, learning, reading, and writing process for visually impaired students. In a cluster braille teaching class, visually impaired students often require a tool to have a bi-directional communication with their teacher as it is hard and not systematic for them to convey their information to teacher in a class through their voice. It is also certainly not easy to teach a blind student in Braille especially when teaching is done for a group of blind students. This is because teachers for blind students must be expert in Braille which limits the number of educators available for blind student. Therefore, the objective of this thesis is to design and develop a Graphical User Interface (GUI) that can convert and display grade 1 braille inputs into alphabets, numbers, and punctuation and vice versa which will allow teachers who does not know Braille to communicate and teach the blind students. The developed braille translating GUI must be able to send and receive data from both teacher and student’s Raspberry Pi wirelessly which will allow two ways communication between blind students and their teacher. GUI for student must have feature to type message in Braille. GUI is to be developed in Python programming language. An experiment is conducted to perform test runs on three algorithms that the GUI is based on which are Braille translation, Braille typing and bi-directional communication. All results show positive outcomes. Grade 1 Braille translation (back and forth) was correct but capital letters are ignored. Algorithm created to type braille in student’s GUI worked accordingly, however, keyboard with N-key rollover feature is strongly recommended for braille six key input. Finally, bi-directional communication based on socket and multithreading programming enables proper communication between teacher’s and student’s Raspberry Pi via Wi-Fi.

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