Enabling Visually Impaired People’s Chinese Literacy learning through Information Technology

Abstract

How to help the visually impaired people in Taiwan to be able to learn Chinese literacy online has been a big challenge. However, in order to overcome the obstacle, we intentionally designed and implemented a cloud-based Visually Impaired People (VIP) E-learning Platform that affords to empower their Chinese literacy learning via specific typing skills and relevant course design so that they would have the opportunity to become independent online navigators and learners as well. To facilitate and examine their performance in terms of typing accuracy and speed on the Chinese typing and information searching online, etc., a competition activity was organized. Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected and analyzed via a questionnaire administered to the 18 participants, divided into three groups based on their ages. The results indicate that overall the participants are highly satisfied with the VIP platform for its empowerment in Chinese literacy learning that affords their online independent learning opportunity and barrier-free communication skills with sighted people after using the VIP platform. Additionally, some suggestions for the VIP platform improvement were given by the participants to achieve a more user-friendly and better online learning environment in the future.