Information and Technology Support for the Training of Visually Impaired People

Abstract

There are a lot of scientists who investigate the problem of information accessibility for visually impaired and totally blind people. Considerable contribution to the creation of information technologies for blind people was made in Sweden, Japan, Germany, USA, France, Canada, Denmark, Great Britain and other leading countries. Unlike the leading countries in Ukraine the information accessibility for blind remains problematic and painful. Solving this problem will help blind people to realize themselves in everyday life. The paper is devoted to solving the actual scientific problem of information availability for people with visual impairments by developing new methods and tools for computer processing and data presentation. The authors presented the developed software system for adapting Ukrainian-language technical texts to people with visual impairments. This system consists of a set of processing and conversion methods for automatic reading mathematical formulas and symbols written in a variety of formats in Ukrainian. As a result, a program of dubbing mathematical formulas «MathPlay» was developed, which showed overall good results of user understanding at the hearing voiced formulas of different complexity that estimates near 92.5%. The obtained results can provide the basis for the development of various training programs, practical courses and workouts of blind people working with the computer, as well as for university education. © 2019 CEUR-WS. All rights reserved.