Adaptive Content Delivery to Assist
Blind Students in Accessing Course Materials
M. Emin Donderler,
K. Selcuk Candan, T. Hedgpeth, S. Panchanathan
For
blind individuals, educational opportunities which can translate to employment
opportunities and independence are scarce. IT strategies can help the
individuals who are blind to overcome these barriers, and to pursue educational
opportunities that will allow them to become productive members of the society.
With this in mind, we conducted extensive discussions with blind students,
researchers involved in disability studies, and companies that manufacture
products in adaptive technology. These engagements resulted in the
identification of user scenarios, which highlight that special care has to be
taken in designing human-computer interfaces and systems for blind students, especially
in hypertext environments.
Hence,
we started designing and developing a system, called iCare-Assistant, to assist blind students in accessing electronic course
materials: courses presented on the Web in hyperlinked form allow students to explore
the content freely, based on their interests and goals. The learner is engaged
in an activity to create both meaning and structure through her decisions with
respect to which link to follow next. However, state-of-the-art browser-based
interfaces rely heavily on users’ visual skills for information presentation,
and can result in significant navigational burden. Existing navigational helps,
such as site maps and visual cues, alleviate this load only for sighted users.
Furthermore, for blind students, screen reader programs are not always helpful
in large hypertext documents with many links, as users must listen to the
entire document. Blind users cannot get an overview of the structure of the
information presented in a Web page or a Web site at glance on the screen, as
sighted people do. Therefore, it is much easier for blind students to get
disoriented in a hypertext environment. Thus, our main goal is to minimize the cognitive
navigational load on blind students, while they access electronic educational
content, such as course Web pages consisting of (a) a syllabus, (b) lecture
notes, (c) assignments, (d) projects, (e) announcements, (f) discussion pages,
(e) group pages, (f) external links, (g) course documents, and (h) grades. To
address these challenges, iCare-Assistant provides unobtrusive, task oriented and individualized
delivery of electronic course information, and handles the tasks of information integration, filtering, and modulation to minimize the information overload that renders
existing educational interfaces unusable by blind students. Following are two
scenarios that exemplify the use of iCare-Assistant
by blind students.
Example Scenario 1: Mr. Willus arrives at a
lecture and configures iCare-Assistant to operate in
its lecture mode. The system consults the user profile manager, sets up the
appropriate integration and presentation modules, fetches the lecture
materials, and sets up the relevant annotation modules. Mr. Willus
may follow the lecture, take notes, and participate in class discussions using iCare-Assistant just like his sighted classmates.
Example Scenario 2: Discussion boards facilitate learning among students
outside the classroom environment, and hence, they are important in education.
Mr. Willus configures iCare-Assistant
to operate in its discussion-board mode at home. He searches the messages
posted under different threads for a specific course simply using predefined
shortcut keys and keywords. Messages that are determined to be important to his
current inquiry are found and brought up to him in a simple-to-browse hierarchy
organized with respect to their relevance and relation to one another. Mr. Willus may post new messages or replies to the messages
that he found by his search, easily.
Our
main thesis in this work is that the education domain is a restricted one,
meaning that a suitable model can be used for addressing many challenges that
are not tractable in unconstraint domains, such as the Web. Hence, new methods
and improvements on the existing ones are needed. We see that our work will
have a significant impact on educational content delivery to blind students,
and improve their educational experience and success. The technical impact
includes research into core universal access, information-management, and
human-computer interaction technologies. Our research outcomes will be
disseminated locally and nationally through ASU's
Disability Resources for Students and its partners.