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Overhead projectors, digital projectors, whiteboards and chalkboards are often used to convey information in educational environments, such as classrooms. However, these visual display methods are not inherently accessible to individuals who are legally blind, and may put them at a disadvantage, compared to their peers.
Several methods have been proposed to make classroompresentations more accessible to students who are legallyblind. For example, lectures might be recorded (for laterreview) or a human note-taker might be hired to take notes,which are then provided to the student. However, theseapproaches do not engage students who are legally blind inthe process of understanding and participating in classroompresentations, and might even encourage them to skip class.
To improve accessibility of classroom lectures for studentswho are legally blind, and to encourage them to take notes,we have developed the Note-Taker. This device requires noexisting infrastructure or prior setup in a classroom, and doesnot require the lecturer to adjust the presentation. However,it makes classroom presentations accessible to many studentswho are legally blind.
In developing the Note-Taker, we investigated the usabilityand the shortcomings of current assistive technologies thatmight be used by students who are legally blind in theclassroom (Sections 3 and 4). Based on these findings, weprototyped a solution that addressed these shortcomings(Section 5), and conducted two case studies (Section 6). Inthe first case study, the first author (who is himself legallyblind) used the Note-Taker for an entire semester; in thesecond case study, another student (who is also legally blind)used a second Note-Taker prototype in classes for one month.
PROBLEM STATEMENT
The Note-Taker project was born out of necessity when the first author, David, found that traditional methods of note taking were proving unsuccessful. In his own words,
?Before senior-level math, I aced college by keeping up with note-taking in lectures as best I could. For some classes, mostly math, it was necessary that I spent extra time in the textbook or reading third-party material, but I always managed to get the grade. Senior-level math was like a slap in the face. Quite suddenly I had no way of keeping up with note-taking, but needed to. We?d fill the boards up half a dozen times proving lemmas and theorems that relied on those lemmas. I routinely got lost in the theorem proofs because in one case, I?d opt not to take notes (and thusforget the lemma by the time of the theorem) or I?d opt to take notes, which entailed such a frantic pace that the lecture was essentially useless. In either case, I wasn?t getting the intuition behind the proofs that the lecture was so importantly attempting to provide. Having had all of high school and most of college to tryout the various classroom assistive technologies, I knew that nothing off-the-shelf was going to fix my problem. That?s when I approached the lab and started bouncing ideas around.?
Through a series of brainstorming exercises, discussions and informal experiments, we found that David?s problems stemmed from one primary issue: As he used a monocular to view the board at the front of the classroom, there was a delay each time David switched from viewing the board to his notes, or from his notes back to the board. These delays stemmed from sitting up to see the board and then hunchingdown to within a few inches from his notes on the desktop. David especially lost time when trying to use his monocular to find and return to the relevant spot on the chalkboard (or whiteboard) at the front of the classroom. Over time, these Board-Note-Board (BNB) delays accumulated to the point that David was unable to keep pace with the lecture. Here is how David described the situation:
?Going from notes to the board was the big problem. I would say it was akin to finding Waldo while limitingyour view to a square inch of the page. What I needed was something that allowed me to view the board and my notes near-simultaneously, like a fully-sighted student. Then I?d stand a chance at keeping up with the lecture.?
A related problem was that David?s monocular of choice, theOcutech [2], provided only a fixed 6X zoom. Thissometimes proved insufficient in classes where the board wasfilled multiple times, since his professors were writingsmaller than he was accustomed to. Particularly when Davidused his Ocutech to try to keep up with notes, he frequentlygot eyestrain headaches that limited his subsequent ability toread ? sometimes for up to 12 hours after the class. Despite athorough literature survey and product review, we found nosolution to be satisfactory, so set out to create our own.

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