Kouki DOI
Information support for children and adults with visually impairments is necessary to back up their independence activity. From teachers at special needs school for students with visually impairments, there is a demand for information support tools that ensure students with visual impairment have access to necessary information inside school buildings.
Teachers and students at special needs school for students with visually impairments require tactile guide maps that allow the students to grasp the arrangement of school buildings and classrooms. On the other hand, because understanding space information by reading tactile guide maps is quite difficult, audio information support is also required.
The aim of this study is to establish a newly production method to create in-school tactile guide maps (trial version) that can allow students with visually impairments at special needs schools for students with visually impairments to grasp the arrangement of school buildings and classrooms. The authors developed a printing machine to create Braille and tactile guide maps using ultraviolet curable resin ink, and created tactile guide maps with high tactility experimentally. They also develop a voice-reading interface (pen type) that allows students with visually impairments to obtain audio information from tactile guide maps. In addition, they conducted interviews with teachers and students at special needs school for students with visually impairments to investigate the ease of use of in-school tactile guide maps. From this interviews, they found that the tactile guide maps developed in this study have highly usability for almost of all of participants in this interviews. This study led to the proposal of a newly production method to create in-school tactile guide maps that allow students with visually impairments to grasp the arrangement of school buildings and classrooms.
Authors
Kouki DOI, Chief Researcher, Ph.D., National Institute of Special Needs Education, Takahiro NISHIMURA, Researcher, Ph.D., National Institute of Special Needs Education, Tsutomu WADA, Manager, Ph.D., Japan Braille Library and Hiroshi FUJIMOTO, Professor, Ph.D., Waseda University