Supporting People Working with Disabled People Towards an Inclusive Society

Overview

From the perspective of disability science and engineering, there are a variety of software sources that help disabled people such as transcription apps and audio guides. On the other hand, there is very few software targeting those who are working with disabled people. Towards an inclusive society, we need to enrich the software that helps them. That is, “supporting software for supporters of disabled people.” This concept makes it easier for many people to start supporting disabled people. In addition, this will be an opportunity to educate the public on disability and will help us to improve disabled people’s environment. In my project, I focused on those who support visually impaired people and developed a smartphone app which translates braille images into plain text. This app would help them to check whether the braille text they wrote is correct or not. I compared three different methods to recognize braille characters in several conditions and I chose the most suitable method to incorporate into my app. As a result, the app I developed could translate braille text and helped me to find out some mistakes in the text. I felt that I could be confident in writing in braille using this app. Therefore, this concept of “supporting supporters” by developing easy-to-use apps could be applied for helping supporters for people with other kinds of disabilities or the socially vulnerable.

Competition history

• ISEF 2021 Systems Software · Entry SOFT022

Resources

• ISEF abstract page ↗

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