A Braille Writing Tutor to Combat Illiteracy

Less than 3 % of the 145 million blind people liv-ing in developing countries are literate. This low literacy rate is in part due to the lack of trained teachers and the challenges associated with learn-ing to write Braille on a traditional slate and sty-lus. These challenges include writing from right to left, writing mirrored images of letters, and re-ceiving significantly delayed feedback. Extensive conversations with the Mathru School for the Blind in Bangalore, India, revealed the need for a ro-bust, low-power, low-cost Braille writing tutor. In this paper, we present the design and deployment of our writing tutor system that uses a novel input device to capture students activity on a slate and stylus and uses a range of scaffolding techniques and Artificial Intelligence to teach writing skills to both beginner and the advanced students. The pa-per also reports lessons learned in the implementa-tion of this project and from a six-week pilot study at the Mathru school and outlines future directions for improvement.