Braille, Auditory and Tactile Tool for Children with Visual Impairments

This paper focuses on the difficulties encountered by teachers when teaching children with visual impairments. Due to unaffordable cost and unavailability, the use of the modern technology in school-based curriculum to assist children with visual disabilities is very low in Sri Lanka. There is a necessity of alternative methods, equipment or models for the children with visually impairments to make progress of their studies. The tool consists of a braille text, three dimensional figurines and audio facilities and is operated by using batteries. These 3D figurines utilize the sense of touch and convey the non-textual vital information. The user can feel these 3D figurines and once he/she moves the parts of the figurine to the correct position the word can be heard. The objective of this researchwas to examine how this educational tool would make it easy to visually impaired children to follow the school curriculum. For the study, children from ages 14 to 16, who are visually impaired and who can read English Braille symbols. According to the findings this tool introduced the concept of self-learning to the visually impaired children, the active participation of children in the learning process was high, while teachers experienced it as an interesting and an interactive way of teaching. This will help visually impaired children to gain a clear knowledge of subjects like Science, History and Literature.