Final Presentation of Projects for Visual Impairment

Estefanía Campos  | 11 de mayo de 2018  | Vistas: 212

As part of the VIII Latin American Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, students from Guatemala and México competed in the Student Design Competition, where they presented projects to facilitate the life of people with visual impairment. Watch the final presentation of their interesting projects.

Smart Braille Keyboard

The project Smart Braille Keyboard, presented by two students from Universidad Tecnológica de la Mixteca, Mexico, opened the event with an interesting proposal for blind or visually impaired kids to practice and improve their braille skills.

The representatives of the project explain each phase of the Design Thinking methodology that was used to develop the Smart Braille Keyboard, a keyboard for learning braille literacy.

SBK is a device that can improve the way that people with visual impairment interact with technology.”

Finally they present a video of testimonials from users of their prototype.

Tales4Us

Later, who students from Universidad Francisco Marroquín presented Tales4Us, a social network in audio format for kids between 6 and 15 years old. They explain it would work similar to Twitter but with voice notes instead.

They share about their inspiration for the project, the necessities identified in the life of kids in their school years. They found out that kids tend to spend too much time alone and in the activities kids do for entertainment they miss much of the experience because of their discapacity. As part of their research, both students visited schools and organizations for blind people to understand their use of technology; they talked about their findings.

Then they explain how the application would work, the tools and functions it would have and where they would test it and introduce it to schools.

Yami

The final project presented is Yami, an auxiliary complement to enable visually impaired people to use mobile devices. The representatives present some data about this disability and say that one way to improve their lives, is to provide them more independence and integration into society, but it usually has high costs, is inaccessible and with high maintenance.

They talk about their journey understanding and studying the problematic of using cell phones for blind people, developing a first prototype and evaluating their product. Based on the feedback and observations received about it, they developed a second and third prototype.

We were able to pinpoint our ideal object to facilitate children’s interaction with technology; without these tests it would have been impossible to conceive objects suitable to real life situations.”

Yami is designed to facilitate the use of smartphones. The students explain how it works, the benefits for the user and some detail about the cost for creating it.