Libraries: Use of KNFB Reader to help blind students scan text to their mobile and hear it read aloud

Arthur Sargeant, Mitesh Patel, Aly Peacock and Susan Smith, Libraries and Learning Innovation, Leeds Metropolitan University

The project team was awarded KNFB Mobile Reader and a Nokia N82 mobile phone. The purpose of this project was to test this particular KNFB mobile technology to ascertain the ability, ease and efficiency with which it could be employed to support students in Higher Education who have a visual impairment or dyslexia. The project was also to be used to raise awareness of the developing mobile technologies in supporting students with disabilities, and to investigate and demonstrate the practicalities required if the institution were to roll out this technology beyond this pilot.

Significant developments
The project involved working with Library staff, Disability Support staff and students. Initial discussions with Disability support staff heralded a balance of comments/questions to be assessed with students when testing the technology. As a result of this work with a number of visually impaired and dyslexic students the conclusions on the technology were:

Positive aspects of the technology for the visually impaired students were felt to be:

• Mobility.
• Flexibility with quick processing speed. 
  
• Good clarity of read back.
• Good customisation features.

Negative aspects of the technology for the visually impaired students were felt to be:

• The keypad was too small and difficult to see and use, not tactile enough.
• The alignment of the camera by voice guidance to be too complex.
• A single market provider.
• High cost.

It was felt that the overall advantage of this technology was to give greater independence to the learner.
      
Positive aspects of the technology for the dyslexic students were felt to be:

• Easy to access and understand instructions delivered through the CD part of the package. All students could use the basic alignment, image capture and text read back within a maximum of 15 minutes.
• Mobility.
• Time saving. The ability to copy lecture notes to have read back at a later time.
• Option of changing setting on equipment such as read back speed and text size.
• Instantly familiar technology in the form of a mobile phone giving support software without the ‘special support technology’ image.
• Accuracy and clarity of read back with just the normal typeface and hidden text errors.

Negative aspects of the technology for the dyslexic students were felt to be:

• High cost.
• Nervousness about any borrowing of the technology due to high cost and vulnerability to theft.
• Limited customizability to screen colour, appearance etc.

Benefits of this approach for inclusion
On testing the following conclusions were drawn:

• For those students with significant visual impairment the technology had limited success as much of the ease of use requires some visual access.
• For those with less severe visual impairment the technology had a more successful reception.
• The younger more IT literate the student the more success the technology achieved in use and acceptance.
• One visually impaired student was able to take the phone to the library shelves, scan and read the subject headings on the end of the shelves, scan and read book spines, find a particular item of interest and then scan and read the book jacket to ascertain if the book would be useful in her studies.
• For dyslexic students the technology was more useful in its familiarity, speed of understanding functionality and functionality itself.
• One dyslexic student found that the ability to have the text read back to him on the move helped greatly where his reading of text sometimes lead to word misinterpretation.

The benefits for the learner indicated by this pilot project:

• True portability of the mobile device to allow learning to take place in any situation.
• Clarity and ease of use for the less visually impaired students. This is less favourable towards students with more severe visual impairment.
• One immediate benefit of the KNFB reader over existing scan and read solutions we have available to our students is its portability as indicated by the above examples.  The existing solutions we have (TextHelp Read and Write, Omnipage, Kurzweil 1000 and Kurzweil 3000) involve using PCs with scanners attached so material must be taken to the PC.  This is OK for portable material such as books and leaflets but not for fixed material such as signage and posters.
• The technology allows flexible access to readings at point of need to improve and enhance the learner experience.
• The technology has the benefit of giving students access to reading material which may be of restricted availability or limited in format for the visually impaired.
• Specialist support for disabled students is made available in a familiar non ‘specialist equipment’ format.
• It is envisaged that the combination of these factors would improve and add value to the learner experience.

Drawbacks and disadvantages
The implementation of this project had no significant disadvantages to students or the institution. There were small issues in obtaining a relevant number of students from potential user groups to test the technology. Visual impairment and dyslexia have a broad spectrum in terms of level of disability and getting feedback from both ends of those spectra was difficult. We have managed to get a number of students (10/12) and staff (8) to test the technology but more testing and more students would perhaps have had a more beneficial effect on our conclusions.

We had intended to allow the students to ‘borrow’ the reader to take off campus and use in more ‘normal’ settings. However two things conspired against us achieving this particular aim:

• Debate around who insured the item once off campus was never concluded.
• Apropos of the above students were reluctant to take the reader off campus being uneasy about the high cost and the vulnerability of the reader with no underlying conclusion around responsibility

Summary and reflection
The inclusion approach has been successful in pedagogical terms as the positive and negative aspects of the technology to the various user groups, such as the flexibility and portability of the device or the high costs were clearly identified. A number of users have stated that if the technology was available to them they would make much use out of it as they found it to be extremely useful, however, as with the majority of new technologies it is not suited to everybody as outlined in the report. Visually impaired users were most critical of the technology but that depended on the extent of their impairment which had a large bearing on their initial use of the reader due to the size of the kit, which is of course a strength for others in its portability. Dyslexic users were more enthusiastic as the ease of use and familiarity of the phone, its portability and the ability to have text read back to them for more clarity of understanding.

As with all new technology the enthusiasm and commitment has to be balanced against cost, uniqueness and availability. Further investigation has confirmed the enthusiasm of a number of potential users for this device supporting their learning. We must now weigh this against the obvious institutional concerns with cost and cost efficiency.