A Group Awareness System for Blinds in Web Co-Authoring Environment

Abstract

Abstract-Generally, it is seen that the disable people most commonly blinds in our society are not encouraged to work with normal community due to lack of vision, communication, and understandings. Fortunately, this is no longer a big issue. By use of modern technology and tools we can develop flexible environments in which blinds work collaboratively with normal ones and share their knowledge with each other to produce a robust and worthy task. In this research, we solve the issue by proposing a platform for different categories of people (fully/partially impaired and normal). The locally/remotely distributed participants work together (online or offline) in a Web based co-authoring environment to produce a shared document. The system presents a simplified design of mechanisms to share, modify, and update document and their resources in a consistent and controlled way such that each group member can easily able to know the updates and be well aware about the current state of the common object. The main goal of the research is to make the handicap persons self-reliant, confident, and independent so that they can play their equal part in every group activity of the society. The approach is evaluated by means of experiments conducted with blinds and normal authors in a distributed environment.

An Intelligent and Interactive Interface to Support Symmetrical Collaborative Educational Writing among Visually Impaired and Sighted Users

“…A survey was conducted [15] with blind people to gauge whether they have any past experience of group activity and if they had done any group activity, then what were the issues and deficiencies they faced. Contrastingly, if no issues were faced, what were their expectations for such an environment.…”