Designing location based learning experiences for people with intellectual disabilities and additional sensory impairments

The research reported here is part of a larger project which seeks to combine serious games (or games based learning) with location based services to help people with intellectual disability and additional sensory impairments to develop work based skills. Specifically this paper reports on where these approaches are combined to scaffold the learning of new routes and ultimately independent travel to new work and educational opportunities. A phased development methodology is applied in a user sensitive manner, to ensure that user feedback drives the ongoing development process. Methods to structure this include group feedback on conceptual storyboards, expert review of prototypes using usability heuristics relating to the main system goals, and finally co-discovery methods with student pairs exploring all three modes of the system in real world contexts. Aspects of developmental and cognitive psychological theories are also reviewed and it is suggested that combining games based learning approaches with location based services is an appropriate combination of technologies for an application specifically designed to scaffold route learning for this target audience

Virtual environment navigation with look-around mode to explore new real spaces by people who are blind

Background. This paper examines the ability of people who are blind to construct a mental map and perform orientation tasks in real space by using Nintendo Wii technologies to explore virtual environments. The participant explores new spaces through haptic and auditory feedback triggered by pointing or walking in the virtual environments and later constructs a mental map, which can be used to navigate in real space. Methods. The study included 10 participants who were congenitally or adventitiously blind, divided into experimental and control groups. The research was implemented by using virtual environments exploration and orientation tasks in real spaces, using both qualitative and quantitative methods in its methodology. Results. The results show that the mode of exploration afforded to the experimental group is radically new in orientation and mobility training; as a result 60% of the experimental participants constructed mental maps that were based on map model, compared to only 30% of the control group participants. Conclusion. Using technology that enabled them to explore and to collect spatial information in a way that does not exist in real space influenced the ability of the experimental group to construct a mental map based on the map model

Emerging issues and current trends in assistive technology use 2007-1010: practising, assisting and enabling learning for all

Following an earlier review in 2007, a further review of the academic literature relating to the uses of assistive technology (AT) by children and young people was completed, covering the period 2007-2011. As in the earlier review, a tripartite taxonomy: technology uses to train or practise, technology uses to assist learning and technology uses to enable learning, was used in order to structure the findings. The key markers for research in this field and during these three years were user involvement, AT on mobile mainstream devices, the visibility of AT, technology for interaction and collaboration, new and developing interfaces and inclusive design principles. The paper concludes by locating these developments within the broader framework of the Digital Divide

Handwriting Recognition Using Semantic Information

: Attempts to improve the performance of handwriting recognition systems have often involved the exploitation of linguistic constraints such as syntax or semantics. In either case, successful implementation requires the creation of a lexical database containing the relevant information. However, to create a database of semantic information from scratch for a realistically sized vocabulary is an enormous task - which is a major reason why so many semantic theories fail to "scale up" from the small, artificial domains in which they were developed. A better approach is to use existing sources of semantic information, such as machine-readable dictionaries (from which definitions may be extracted) and text corpora (from which collocations may be derived). This paper describes the development of techniques that use such resources to improve the performance of handwriting recognition systems. KEY WORDS: handwriting recognition, semantic information, machine-readable dictionaries, text corpora..

Text Segmentation Using Reiteration and Collocation

A method is presented for segmenting text into subtopic areas. The proportion of related pairwise words is calculated between adjacent windows of text to determine their lexical similarity. The lexical cohesion relations of reiteration and collocation are used to identify related words. These relations are automatically located using a combination of three linguistic features: word repetition, collocation and relation weights. This method is shown to successfully detect known subject changes in text and corresponds well to the segmentations placed by test subjects

Dynamic cursive script recognition - A hybrid approach

: Dynamic (on-line) cursive script recognition works with data obtained from a digitising device which contains temporal information regarding the order of writing. In such a system the data is processed as entered, or immediately afterwards. Direct feedback can be provided to the user. Users of interactive dynamic recognition systems can adjust their writing style so as to obtain the best recognition results. They can write more legibly. However when a word is long the writing tends to deteriorate, making the recognition task more difficult. This paper describes two approaches to recognition: a strict method, requiring recognition of all the letters in a word, and a more tolerant method which recognizes only a part of the word and postulates the ending using a lexicon. The strict recognition employs a pattern recognizer operating at the input data level and uses a lexicon to remove character strings not allowable for the language concerned. Thus ambiguity is removed by the higher leve..

Contextual Analysis for Text Recognition: A Comparison with Human Performance

: A common approach to the recognition of text (handwritten or machineprinted) is to generate a set of candidate words for each unknown word in the input. The resulting sequence of word candidate sets may then be further disambiguated by applying contextual knowledge in the form of a language model. This paper describes language models derived from large text corpora and demonstrates the performance improvements obtained. In addition, it describes an experiment in which word candidate sets were presented to human subjects for manual disambiguation. The error rates so produced provide an independent, quantitative measure of the difficulty of this task. Moreover, a second trial in which the subjects were provided with domain information produced significantly reduced error rates. This result suggests that the effective use of topic area information can make a valuable contribution to the text recognition process. 1. Introduction There is much evidence to suggest that there is more to th..