Sahayat a Transcription System to Help the Visually Impaired in Mathematical Examinations

Abstract

Mathematics is essential in many fields, including natural science, engineering, medicine and finance. Learning Mathematics is complicated when it comes to visually impaired people as they don’t get any visual information. Visually impaired students depend on the sense of touch and hearing for learning and practicing mathematics. Visually impaired do mathematical calculations with the help of braille calculators or manually. Various technological inventions help visual impaired to learn and understand mathematics at ease but still during examination, they depend on a physical scribe. Existing systems such as TalkMaths and SpeakMath take documents as input and gives audio output to the user but does not help with any calculations. There are braille calculators, which helps in calculation via braille keyboard and produces speech output but these calculators perform only basic calculations. However, these do not provide complete solutions as they do not perform any complex calculations. The main reason behind the development of this proposed transcription system is to perform complex mathematical operations and calculations. The proposed system also acts as virtual scribe system helping visually impaired students during exams without any difficulty. SAHAYAT makes the evaluation process even more easier which helps teachers during examinations..