Design of a tactile audio gallery for visually impaired students

Technological advances towards improving teaching tools to aid better learning experience for visually impaired students is continuously driven. The challenge from the engineering design perspective is to develop systems that can provide comprehensive information, as imparted to visually aided students in a classroom. Braille for text is highly useful, but does not provide adequate information for pictorial representations. Hence, learning from diagrams or graphs is challenging for visually impaired students. An alternate method is needed to deliver content and provide an enhanced learning experience. A tactile audio gallery tool was developed to offer consolidated guided information in a view to improve learning experience for visually impaired students. The novel educational tactile audio graphics platform consists of a board with embossed pictorial diagram, designed with embedded array of parallel plate capacitors that are interfaced to the microcontroller with in-built speakers to deliver the content. The content in the form of text is preloaded in the memory, which is accessed by the microcontroller and rendered to the speaker, on tactile response.