ABSTRACT

Visual impairment can affect a student’s ability to learn since their concept development when interacting with educational material is being limited. Learning activities based on images and visually rich content are mainstream learning methods, where facilitating students with visual impairments for engaged learning can be challenging. For comic books, which have shown promising results in engaged student learning, this problem is more severe. To overcome this challenge, this research presents a novel voice synthesised learning method to reduce the gap between the learning experience of a student with visual impairments compared to a mainstream learning activity. Utilising comic books, the proposed technique and the tool developed extracts semantic content, stores them in a database, and generates an audio stream in multiple languages on the user’s demand. To assess the usability of the system, a survey for a selected set of students with visual impairments was carried out. The results showed a mean rating of 5.76 out of 7 for the Informative Interest. Furthermore, a concept-mapping approach was used to analyse the feedback given through the open-ended questions. From the analysis, key concepts with an emphasis on positive emotions, willingness to try again, and features to be improved, were identified.

摘要

视觉障碍会影响学生的学习能力，因为他们在与教育材料互动时的概念发展受到限制。基于图像和视觉丰富内容的学习活动是主流学习方法，帮助视力障碍学生进行参与式学习可能具有挑战性。对于漫画书来说，这个问题更为严重，因为漫画书在学生的积极学习中显示出了可喜的成果。为了克服这一挑战，本研究提出了一种新颖的语音合成学习方法，以缩小视力障碍学生的学习体验与主流学习活动之间的差距。利用漫画书，所提出的技术和开发的工具提取语义内容，将它们存储在数据库中，并根据用户的需求生成多种语言的音频流。为了评估该系统的可用性，对一组选定的有视力障碍的学生进行了调查。结果显示，信息兴趣的平均评分为 5.76（满分 7 分）。此外，还使用概念图方法来分析通过开放式问题给出的反馈。通过分析，确定了强调积极情绪、再次尝试的意愿以及需要改进的功能的关键概念。