LEARNING AND TEACHING INNOVATION FOR STUDENTS WITH SPECIAL EDUCATION NEEDS

People with visual impairment have faced many types of barriers which restrict them from
being a part in society. Therefore, it is important to make them have opportunities in
education as similar to a normal person as possible. Learning on topics of graphs and
equations in mathematics is important example of main difficulties in education of visually
impaired people. This is because, learners need to see graphs to get understanding on the
topics. Interestingly, the technology can play a significant role to support them to get through
such limitation. Thus, this work is to present a developed Braille Graph Builder program
which can support both visually impaired students and instructors to have a better experience
in teaching and learning graphs and equations. Visually impaired instructors can use this
program to create teaching materials (i.e. braille graphs), which will be later on used by
visually impaired students in a class. The program is developed by using Java language under
Window platform. The text-to-speech is employed to speak out all working processes during
the program usage, in order to facilitate the visually impaired users. Then, they can check the
correctness of the constructed graphs by asking the program to speak out the graphs’
descriptions and/or to generate the sound presenting the curve of each graph at different
frequencies. Later, the users can print out graphs in the braille format to be used in
teaching/studying the mathematical subject.