Photonote Evaluation: Aiding Students With Disabilities in a Lecture Environment
By Hughes, Gregory; Robinson, Peter; ASSETS 2007 - The Ninth International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility, pp. 99-107Publication Date: October 15-17, 2007
Evaluation of the Photonote, a system enhancing visual materials presented in lectures for students with disabilities. The Photonote system uses a digital-still camera to capture visual information, a digital-video camera to capture a lecturer, and a second digital-video camera to capture a sign-language interpreter if needed. The visual information is enhanced using computer-vision algorithms and presented alongside the recorded video and audio to provide an accurate representation of a lecture. An evaluation of the system was conducted with 33 study participants aged 18 to 61 and divided into 5 groups: (1) hearing impairments; (2) visual impairments; (3) learning disabilities; (4) mobility impairments; and (5) no disabilities. Participants attended 2 consecutive lectures followed a week later by a review session in 2 groups using either of 2 methods: the Photonote system along with participants’ own lecture notes, or participants’ own notes along with those of a note-taker. The methods were reversed for the groups between the first and second lecture. A multiple-choice/true-false examination on the lecture material followed. Study results revealed that Photonote helped males who consider themselves to have a disability more than females, and it was definitely helpful to students who utilize a note-taker during lectures.
Published by: Association for Computing Machinery (Website:http://www.acm.org)
SIGACCESS (ACM Special Interest Group on Accessible Computing) (Web Site: http://www.sigaccess.org )
