Finger Braille Teaching System for People who Communicate with Deafblind People

Finger Braille is one of tactual communication media of deafblind people. In finger Braille, index finger, middle finger and ring finger of both hands are likened to keys of a Braille typewriter. A sender dots Braille code on the fingers of a receiver like whether he/she does the type of the Braille typewriter. Then the receiver recognizes the Braille code. Deafblind people who are skilled in finger Braille can catch up with speech conversation and express various emotions. Because there are small non-disabled people who are skilled in finger Braille, deafblind people communicate only with interpreters. In this paper, we developed a finger Braille teaching system and designed a teaching interface which taught clauses explicitly. The teaching system recognized non-disabled people's speech and converted to Braille code. By parsing the Braille code, the teaching system retrieved clause information and segmented the Braille code into clauses. Then the dot pattern of the Braille code was displayed. By observing the dot pattern, non-disabled people dotted Finger Braille to deafblind people. An evaluation experiment between a blind person who was skilled in Finger Braille and two nondisabled people who were non-skilled in Finger Braille was carried out. The results showed that the fundamental functions (speech recognition, conversion to Braille code and clause segmentation) were practicable; the nondisabled senders could dot finger Braille accurately and communicate with the blind receiver directly. Therefore it was considered that the teaching system was effective.