Titration is a common introductory experiment performed across teaching laboratories from high school to university. Yet, its setup remains inaccessible for students with disabilities, denying them the opportunity for experiential learning. Therefore, rethinking such a setup is required to increase laboratory participation for these students.To remove these physical barriers, an automated titration unit based on existing undergraduate titration setups and universal design concepts, coupled with text-to-speech (TTS) capability, is presented. This unit can connect seamlessly via Bluetooth to any mobile platform and takes advantage of the advances in assistive features, such as TTS, on either a tablet or a smartphone. The cost of this unit is between $300 and $500, not including the cost of the smartphone or tablet. However, with the popularity of mobile devices in our society, these devices are becoming highly affordable, and almost every undergraduate is equipped with such a device. Also, with the emphasis on coding literacy, this autotitration setup serves as an excellent example and exercise on design thinking and automation in an undergraduate chemistry lab.
With the advances in open-source technology, many laboratory devices can be built with a modest budget, particularly assistive laboratory devices. The current market cost of most assistive laboratory devices is a major barrier for students with accessibility needs. Specifically, for students with visual impairment, their limited choice of laboratory assistive devices has motivated us to construct a low-cost, multipurpose sensor hub capable of connecting to a pH electrode or a thermocouple, two sensors commonly used in many chemistry teaching laboratories. In this technology report, we present the construction of a text-to-speech (TTS) multipurpose universal chemistry sensor hub (MUCSH) built using an Arduino platform and other associated open-source electronic parts.
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