Research Article
Analysis and Evaluation of Braille to Text Conversion Methods
Sana Shokat,
1
Rabia Riaz,
1
Sanam Shahla Rizvi,
2
Khalil Khan,
1
Farina Riaz,
3
andSeJinKwon
4
1
e University of Azad Jammu and Kashmir, Muzaffarabad 13100, Pakistan
2
Raptor Interactive (Pty) Ltd., Eco Boulevard, Witch Hazel Ave, Centurion 0157, South Africa
3
University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, Australia
4
Department of Computer Engineering, Kangwon National University, Samcheok 25806, Republic of Korea
Correspondence should be addressed to Se Jin Kwon; sjkwon@kangwon.ac.kr
Received 14 February 2020; Revised 5 May 2020; Accepted 4 June 2020; Published 26 July 2020
Academic Editor: Ali Kashif Bashir
Copyright © 2020 Sana Shokat et al. is is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License,
which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Technology is advancing rapidly in present times. To serve as a useful and connected part of the community, everyone is required
to learn and update themselves on innovations. Visually impaired people fall behind in this regard because of their inherent
limitations. To involve these people as active participants within communities, technology must be modified for their facilitation.
is paper provides a comprehensive survey of various user input schemes designed for the visually impaired for Braille to natural
language conversion. ese techniques are analyzed in detail with a focus on their accessibility and usability. Currently, con-
siderable effort has been made to design a touch-screen input mechanism for visually impaired people, such as Braille Touch,
Braille Enter, and Edge Braille. All of these schemes use location-specific input and challenge visually impaired persons to locate
specified places on the touch screen. Most of the schemes require special actions to switch between upper and lowercase and
between numbers and special characters, which affects system usability. e key features used for accessing the performance of
these techniques are efficiency, accuracy, and usability issues found in the applications. In the end, a comparison of all these
techniques is performed. Outcomes of this analysis show that there is a strong need for application that put the least burden on the
visually impaired users. Based on this survey, a guideline has been designed for future research in this area.
1.Introduction
Visually impaired people are an important part of every
community [1]. ey are also concerned in learning the
details of everything they encounter in their daily life [2]. e
total number of visually impaired people is 2.2 billion;
among them, 36 million are completely blind, and rest of the
1 billion have moderate to severe vision impairment [3].
Approximately thirty-seven million of the six billion
populations worldwide are suffering from blindness. Un-
fortunately, 80% of blind people live in developing countries
with restricted facilities for them [4].
Smartphones have become an integral part of everyday
life. An expected increase of smartphone users will increase
up to nine billion by 2022 [5]. e widespread use of
smartphones has brought significant changes in how people
learn. Research indicates that about one-third of smartphone
usage consists of educational activities. Although smart-
phone usage has increased exponentially, it has low prev-
alence among people with visual disabilities. ere are many
complex accessibility issues that must be resolved in order to
enable the full inclusion of this community [6]. Accessibility
issues have been an important research domain over the last
few years promoting the development of thousands of
smartphone applications to help people with a visual dis-
ability, e.g., voiceOver services, talkback services, screen
readers, and navigators.
ese researches resulted in a dramatic increase in
mobile-screen reader usage for the visually impaired, from
12% in 2009 to 88% in 2019 [7]. Despite the benefits that
smart devices can offer, if the learning applications are not
properly designed, their touch-screen interfaces may place
an extra burden on blind learners. ere are features such as
VoiceOver for iPhone that help blind users interact with
Hindawi
Mobile Information Systems
Volume 2020, Article ID 3461651, 14 pages
https://doi.org/10.1155/2020/3461651