Open-Source Based Mobile Application for Helping Handicapped Students Play Chess and Educational Video Games on Computers

摘要

Open-source tools are utilized to create an Android application that allows handicapped students to play educational computer games such as chess without typing. Google Voice Recognition (GVR), which is a free and open Android tool, running in an Android phone is utilized to convert speech to text. The text is sent via Wi-Fi to a server running in a nearby workstation with a large screen that plays the game. Commands or game movements generated by the computer or the opponent are converted to speech using the text-to-speech (TTS) engine provided by the Android OS. A hashing scheme is used to search for the right text effectively. The producer-consumer paradigm and condition variables are used to synchronize activities and thread events. The techniques described in the paper can be employed to develop other educational computer games for handicapped students to play.