Keywords

1 Introduction

“A good sketch is better than a long speech”… For sighted people. Graphics and sketches are power tools to organize and to communicate synthetically pieces of information and correlation between them. A good sketch appeals to the visual memory and helps to remember easily processes, relationships, comparative statistics, data evolutions, geographical data, sequences (timelines for instance), etc. Even if relief impressions may help blind people to explore a sketch by touch (D’Angiulli et al. 1998; Picard and Lebaz 2012; Picard et al. 2013), the tactilo-kinesthetic (haptic) perception and exploration does not enable an immediate and global understanding (D’Angiulli et al. 1998; Withagen et al. 2010). Understanding structured information through a haptic exploration may require a high cognitive effort and a complementary explanation of the figure may be required (Picard and Lebaz 2012; Van Doorn et al. 2012). Retrieving information into a sketch through haptic exploration is another challenging task (Lederman and Campbell 1983).

Sketches are commonly used in educational processes. However, this powerful communication and learning tool remains inaccessible for blind people the most part of the time. In Brazil, local of this study, where the integration politic aims at keeping impaired people into everyone school (SÁ 2006), the schools equipped with a relief printer are very few, the teachers really trained to deal with impairment are very few, and teachers have no other tools that may help them to adapt the teaching to impairments.

Smartphones are very widespread among adolescents. They also offer accessibility mode enabling basic uses for blind people (Frey et al. 2011; Romero et al. 2011). They would be a good vehicle to implant assistive educational tools completing the traditional school material. These tools would be a good way to translate, explain, or adapt visual contents to blind people. Moreover, they could reach the final users without a significant investment.

Chemistry is a discipline very rich in symbols and representations. They are very important in the understanding of chemical processes (Kozma et al. 2000). But, these representations are not easily turned accessible to blind people. Moreover without an adapted physical material that could be manipulated. Then, alternative lessons support would be useful to fulfill this lack. For this purpose, we are presenting here the assistive tool Quimivox Mobile, developed for smartphones, tackling some aspects of chemistry lessons: the Mendeleev periodic table and chemical properties of elements.

The rest of the article is divided into four section and a conclusion. The first section presents the social context and challenges of the research. The second section reviews the state of art. The third section explains Quimivox Mobile paradigms and interactions, and the last section describes the evaluation performed with final users. Then, the conclusion highlights the good acceptation of the tool and new evolution perspectives extracted during the evaluation process.

2 Social Context of the Study

In Brazil, local of this study, according to the IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics), about 6,5 million peoples suffer of sever vision problems. Among them 582.000 are totally blind and 6 million suffer of low vision requiring accessible tools and structures (Isaude 2015). Sever vision problems are the most common impairments into Brazilian society.

With regard to chemistry learning, visual impaired students are confronted to two main problems: the limits of Brazilian impaired people integration politic and the specificity of chemistry discipline that have a rich symbolic language.

2.1 Limits of Impaired People Integration Politic in Brazil

Since the beginning of the last decade, Brazil initiated a politic in favor of impaired people integration. At first sight, these politic orientations seem to be ambitious. However, political discourses and law adoptions were not systematically sustained by the material and the human investments into the public sphere required to turn it effective.

Thus, in regard for visual impairment, blind children and students are integrated into normal schools like every other child (children with or without other impairment). From a social point of view, this inclusion is a good thing. However, the schools are very frequently not prepared to receipt them correctly: the structure is physically not prepared, the professors are not trained to lead with visual impairment (or any other kind of impairment), and basic material support such as braille printer or other numeric solution (braille keyboard, screen readers, etc.) are not provided to the schools. So, the responsibility is entirely in charge of headmaster and professors to improvise and adapt themselves to the situation without recommendations and orientations from specialists trained to lead with the specificity of the impairment.

As a consequence, a blind child is well socially integrated, but does not benefit of a specific teaching and learning environment required by his impairment and suffer difficulties to accompany the lessons.

2.2 Teaching Chemistry to Blind People

Chemistry discipline involves the understanding of several representation elaborated toward a high set of symbols (Kozma et al. 2000). These representations define a true visual language that ease drastically the understanding of the processes implicated into chemical reactions. Visuospacial perception and geometry are very important is the understanding (Wu and Shah 2004), that why many researchers work on improving representations in the education in chemistry field (Fjeld and Voegtli 2002; Linioua 2006). This visual language is difficult to adapt and translate for blind people. Teaching chemistry without the support of it is teaching another discipline and would require other lesson support and tools (and probably a specific professional formation too).

Several recommendations exist to improve the teaching for blind and visually impaired students. The American Chemical Society Committee on Chemists with Disabilities (Miner et al. 2001) propose an instruction book to help the chemistry teacher to lead with every kind of impairment. Supalo (2005) published several orientation and among the how to elaborate relief material for blind people, how to write mathematical expression, perform quizzes and exams and how to turn laboratory safe. Graybill (2008) explained how to adapt a chemistry laboratory for blind people and present some strategies to perform measures, elaborate periodic table representation, ionic models, etc. (cf. Fig. 1).

Fig. 1.
figure 1

Notched Braille cards illustrating ionic bonding between cations and anions (left). Tactile periodic trends’ models made of clayns (middle) and plastic drinking straws (right) (Graybill et al. 2008)

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3 State of Art

Quimivox mobile may help blind people to explore the Mendeleev periodic table using a Smartphone, so we oriented this state of art toward two aspects: (i) at first, we describes some accessibility tools and accessible application existing on Smartphone; (ii) and at last, the existing educational tool for chemistry learning.

3.1 Accessibility on Smartphone

Mobile devices, such as IOS or Android Smartphone, provide accessible tools for peoples with low vision and blind peoples. Sometimes, some graphical adaptations like zoom or increased fonts, color alteration and contrast increasing solve the accessibility problem for low vision. However, for blindness, the OS provides a complete adapted set of interactions. They provide feedbacks toward screen-readers and vibration. Navigation into the applications is performed by simple and double touch pressure (where simple touch serves as consultation of the interface components and double touch serves as input interaction), simple and multi-touch gestures and text input by voice recognition. Techniques such as BraillTouch (Frey et al. 2011; Romero et al. 2011), Fig. 2, also enables braille text inputs.

Fig. 2.
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BrailleTouch

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However, there is not a systematical equivalency between sight and blind interaction modalities. Obviously, screen readers implanted on smartphone does not interpret the structure of the interface, or interface contents such as images or graphics in order to produce sense for blind people and then does not transcribe the visual organization of information (Shaik 2010). So, applications should take into account accessibility in their own design and sometimes specifically should be specifically redesigned for blindness like R-MAP (Shaik et al. 2010), or Sonic-Badminton (KIM 2016). It is unusual and many application remains inaccessible in spite of the native assistive tools.

3.2 Educational Tools in Chemistry on Smartphones

The principal scientific software oriented toward chemistry are helping to find probable chemical reaction into large databases of reactions. In regard to education, the computation is more exploited to produce pedagogic visual representation of the molecular structure and animated reaction behavior simulation. For instance, (Fjeld and Voegtli 2002) proposes an educational augmented workbench that enable to interact with atoms and molecules and CAVE (Linioua 2006) is an full immersive environment to observe 3D molecules.

These educational tools experiment how to improve the understanding toward a better visual representation and obviously are not reaching blind people. It is also the problem of the existing educational tools designed on smartphone in area of chemistry pointed by (Libman and Huang 2013) and the University of ChicagoFootnote 1. They are not targeting visual impaired users or are not accessible to them.

Some works (Linioua 2006, Fjeld and Voegtli 2002, Fjeld et al. 2007, Chen 2006) reproduce the manipulation of physical molecular models using haptic devices and augmented reality. We have no feedbacks from blind users about the experience of this systems. But, at first sight, we do not think that the 3D representation and haptic feedbacks would increase the haptic exploration by blind people in comparison with the manipulation of physical objects.

In regard to the periodic table more specifically, the tested applications such as Educalabs Periodic Table (a 3D periodic table providing information on element properties and their electronic organization), Xenubi Periodic table, or else Periodic Table Quiz (two applications helping to fix the knowledge after periodic table study), that are available for Portuguese (Nichele 2014), are not accessible to blind people.

In fact, the organizational information structure is very important in the understanding of Mendeleev table. So, it is a typical circumstance where we need a very specific application design in order to turn it accessible to blind people.

4 Quimivox Mobile

Quimivox Mobile enable blind users (and sight users too) to access Mendeleev table, electronic table structure and element properties toward a Smartphone with touch screen.

4.1 Main Paradigms

We designed Quimivox Mobile so as to benefit of existing accessible resources provided by Android operating system. We also reuse the standard interaction and navigation paradigms used for accessible applications on Smartphone.

Quimivox Mobile follows simple guidelines (cf. Fig. 2):

  • Basic gesture to navigate into menus and into the periodic table (up, down, right and left, interacting with one or two fingers);

  • Simple pressure to require a feedback about the selected item;

  • Double pressure to enter into a menu or element;

  • Vocal synthesis in redundancy with the graphical output.

However, the vocal synthesis is not only a text-to-speech screen lecture, whereas it brings other contextual information to help the user to understand the global structure of the table and orienting him to retrieve needed information. As well as the navigation into the periodic period, Quimivox Mobile offers alternatives strategy to help the users to access to element information. Among them, users can look into the element lists organized by atomic number or alphabetic order, with several interaction shortcuts to improve the navigation. We are also implementing a vocal research in the current version of the software (it was not implemented yet for the first evaluation). At the start of the application, the software provide a description of interaction paradigms, software structure and content. The user may interrupt the description and may cancel it for the next application starts. The software is optimized for blind people, but it remains plainly accessible to everyone, what enable a discussion between sighted and blind people about the periodic table through the software (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3.
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Quimivox Mobile paradigms

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5 Experimental Evaluation Process

The Quimivox Mobile usability has been experimentally evaluated by final users: 10 blind peoples, toward qualitative aspects.

5.1 Users

The ten users were aged 19 to 44. They all completed high school, 6 were graduating, and two of them had completed graduation. Four of the users were blind since the birth and had no visual memory. The other turned blind after several years and conserved a visual memory. Some of the users had basic notions of the Mendeleev Table purpose: organization of elements into a table. However, at the beginning, the majority of them was reluctant to participate to the evaluation fearing that the test would evaluate their knowledge toward Mendeleev Table and they did not feel able to pass such a test.

5.2 Tasks

The experimentation was realized individually and helped by an experimenter member of the project. The users operate on a Smartphone Galaxy J5 equipped with Quimivox Mobile.

The experiment began by a software explanation provided at the start of the software. The explanation described the content of the software, the interaction and navigation paradigms, and how to access to element information.

Then, the user had to respond at several questions about the elements and about the Mendeleev table structure. The experimenter read a question to the user. Every response was accessible navigating into Quimivox Mobile. The information to retrieved was many time accessible through several ways. The user had to search the response by using the software. After evaluating the success or failure of the task, the experimenter registered the time required to perform the task and the software tools used to meet the information and the carried on with the next task read. They were 10 tasks.

5.3 Evaluated Characteristics

We evaluated the success or failure (wrong answer or eventual desistence of the user to achieve the task) for every task. We also evaluate the time needed to perform every task and the path used to reach the information. The task was timed by the experimenter.

At the end of the experiment, every user had access to an electronic questionnaire appreciating qualitative aspect of the tools accessibility, usability and utility (criteria evaluated between 0 – very bad to 10 – excellent). A last section of the questionnaire invited them to express open critics and improvement suggestion.

The experimenter was also present to observe and report any problem encountered by the user or any spontaneous reaction from him during the task realization.

5.4 Results

Every user completed every task successfully. The time required to perform the task and retrieve the information has been evaluated satisfactory by the users. Born blind users required more time to perform the tasks (between 14 and 16 min) than users that turned blind after several years and conserved a visual memory (between 9 and 12 min).

The users tend to select a tool and maintain the same research strategy to perform the different tasks. No user used every available tools.

The qualitative questioner highlighted a very good acceptability of the software. At first, the users reinforced the utility of the software and considered at unanimity that Quimivox Mobile could be a very useful tools to help chemistry teaching to visual impaired users.

They also highlighted the very good accessibility of the tools and observed that the navigation strategy are very coherent with the accessibility standard that turn the software very intuitive to learn.

At last, they underlined the importance of the software auto-explication at the start of the software that enable to have a first global idea about the services that the software provide, and how and where are organized the menu and tools.

The users proposed some interesting improvement too. The only real critic was the inexistence of a simple interaction enabling to interrupt the vocal synthesis. They explained that frequently, when they wanted to locate themselves into the software, they started a long and needless speech traducing the whole information of the pages. So, they suggested an interaction to interrupt the voice synthesis when desired.

Some of the users suggested another alternative to organize the elements: a menu with elements organized by alphabetic order. The alphabetic order is presented as a search criterion more natural when the user research information toward an element characteristic independently of the table structure.

In order to improve the interaction velocity, some users also suggested to provide some interaction shortcuts mainly to navigate in long lists.

At last, some users recommended a vocal research. This vocal research was ever in development but not available during the experimentation.

6 Conclusion

So, the project achieves its objectives and enable to provide a new tool helping visual impaired users in chemistry learning. The success of Quimivox Mobile is because it does not act only as a standard and generic assistive tool, such as screen reader, whereas it is completely designed to deal with visual impairment. Then, the chemistry contents are organized and explained for the blind users and the visual clues needed to understand the information structure and organization are translated for them.

The evaluation received very positive feedbacks and suggested several improvement. Soon we will propose a new version of Quimivox Mobile integrating these suggestions.