Evaluation of a Multilingual Workspace to Practice Math for Visually Impaired Students

An interactive workspace that enables learning and practicing Algebra for visually impaired students using Arabic or English was built. In this paper, the experiments conducted to evaluate the efficiency, effectiveness and user satisfaction of the proposed system are described. Visually impaired students from upper elementary and middle school in Lebanon participated in testing the implementation of the workspace. The effectiveness of the system is much better than that of other existing systems. All students were able to solve all exercises correctly using the hints suggested by the system in learning mode. In addition, a 40% reduction in learning time was recorded compared to using already existing systems with a sighted person giving the student hints. Moreover, using the system, students were able to learn and practice operations they were incapable of performing using traditional tools.