USING SPATIAL NON-SPEECH SOUND TO RELAY MATHEMATICAL PROBLEMS TO VISUALLY DISABLED STUDENTS

摘要

Visually disabled students face many challenges within the education system, perhaps most notably in the areas of science and mathematics. We propose the use of advanced audio techniques used in gaming technology to convey to the student an overview of spatial elements in trigonometry. We used spatial, non-speech sound using Microsoft's XNA development tools to relay an impression of triangular shapes. We compared pilot study results relating to text-to-speech and spatial non-speech sound. We employed a User Interface Model on a number of the spatial non-speech designs in order to consider the complex cognitive issues involved. We found that text-to-speech performed reasonably well in terms of relaying shape details to the user but task completion times were slow. The spatial non-speech design, which was not based on our User Interface Model, had even slower task completion times and was less accurate than text-to-speech. Our final pilot study (spatial nonspeech sound based on a User Model) revealed timing that was much faster than both the previous spatial non-speech design and text-to-speech. However, its accuracy was still slightly below text-tospeech but was a marked improvement on the previous spatial non-speech design. We anticipate that future work already in progress will help increase accuracy levels beyond text-to-speech while maintaining low task completion times.