Spoken Dialogue System for Learning Braille

Learning Braille, patterns of raised dots representing characters for visually impaired individuals, requires the assistance of another person to help identify the correspondence between the Braille pattern and the character. A self-learning system using speech technology would help a learner master Braille. We developed a spoken dialogue system that allows visually impaired individuals to self learn Braille, thus, eliminating the need for assistance. Our system comprises a mechanical Braille display that converts a character code to a Braille pattern, speech recognizer, speech synthesizer and dialogue manager. The software of the learning system was constructed using a platform for communication support systems, for hearing and/or visually impaired individuals, that is based on our Multimodal Interaction system architecture. Participants reported positive impressions as a result of using the developed Braille learning system.