Nowadays, the math learning is an important step in developing professional carriers in technical and economic sciences. Increasing the number of e-learning tools used in universities courses can reduce the potential barrier of access to mathematical knowledge, but most of them are not accessible for impaired students. Moreover, classical printed math books include little explicit instructional information about structural information interpretations. Taking into account these barriers the article presents the developed method used for creating interactive steps of decomposed math's exercise solution and alternative description of math formulas accessible for the blind. The elements of proposed methodology: generation of state machine, design and presentation of transition conditions, generating the presentation layer and a typical usage by a blind user are presented. A set of rules for describing mathematical formulas were proposed after consultation with mathematicians and teachers of blind people. The application was developed as web application. The graphical interface of presented application was designed using PHP and JavaScript technologies. The collection of prepared exercises include about 240 prepared exercises from different areas of mathematics Multimed Tools Appl (2018) and 60 selected exercises including alternative description layer. About 1000 students and about 40 impaired students, from 6 faculties of the university use this platform during math courses for both self and class learning. The defined rules were used to read aloud mathematical formulas to the visually impaired people with a different level of mathematical knowledge. The results confirmed good understanding of mathematical formulas by using prepared alternative description.
The paper presents main ideas, aims and implementation of ForMath-intelligent tutoring system in mathematics which is a project developed at Silesian University of Technology. Up till now, the project has contained mathematical problems for engineering students, but in the future it will be adapted to other courses. The proposed platform has both the advantages of e-learning courses and innovative elements such as interactivity (hints or theory on the user's request, suggested individual path, remedial sessions when necessary) and the accessibility of the system for students with disabilities.
One of the problems faced by people with blindness is access to materials presented in graphical form. There are many alternative forms of providing such information, but they are very often ineffective or have certain limitations. The development of mobile devices and touch sensors enabled the development of new tools to support such people. This study presents a solution called an accessible tutoring platform, using audio-tactile graphics for people with blindness. We aimed to research the influence of the developed platform for the alternative presentation of graphics information on better memorizing, recognizing, and learning. Another goal of the research was to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method for the alternative presentation of audio-tactile graphics. The effectiveness of the proposed solution was verified quantitatively and qualitatively on two groups of blind students from primary and secondary schools with the use of a developed platform and prepared materials for learning mathematics. The obtained research results show that the proposed method of verifying students’ knowledge and auto-selecting exercises with adapted audio description positively influences the improvement of learning effectiveness.
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