Abstract
Students with visual impairments suffer from a lack of inclusion as they face difficulties accessing the library’s collection to aid their learning and research. The current solution as adopted in some initiatives is to convert physical books into Braille documents. This approach generates a single page of text material into approximately ten (10) pages of material written in the Brail language. This is in addition to the bulky nature of the Braille equipment and because of the specialized use, could also pose difficulties when there is a need to train a large number of learners. Progress made in the areas of enhancing the performance of academic libraries with assistive software technologies has not achieved much impact in a developing country like Nigeria. The goal of this research is to foster inclusion for Visually Impaired Students through the development of Digital Audio Libraries. As many academic resources as possible would be vocalized in English and using the three major classifications of Nigerian accents -Northern, Southern, and Mid-Western. The system will incorporate automatic speech recognition, text-to-speech synthesis, and an intelligent bot to achieve an assistive technology to deliver a listening application for visually impaired students. The audio database will be hosted in one institution in each of the 6 geopolitical zones and downloading and storing of the audio files on mobile devices as well as sharing through communication platforms (WhatsApp and Telegram) would be supported.
Presenters
Francisca Onaolapo OladipoVice-Chancellor, Thomas Adewumi University, Nigeria, Kwara, Nigeria
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
Learner Diversity and Identities
KEYWORDS
DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION, AUDIO LIBRARIES, VISUALLY IMPAIRED STUDENTS
