Braille Hero : Feedback modalities and their effectiveness on alphabetic braille learning

Sammanfattning: Braille literacy is an important and vital part of visually impaired and blind peoples’ everyday lives. The purpose of this paper was to evaluate different feedback modalities used in a smartphone game and analyze their impact and effectiveness on alphabetic braille learning. In this study, three different modalities were used and tested. These were tactile feedback, auditory feedback, and a combination of both. A quantitative method and a post-test consisting of braille writing and reading exercises was used to measure the effectiveness of each feedback modality. 18 people, equally distributed between the three different feedback modalities participated in the study. Each played the game using blindfolds. The result show that there was no statistically significant difference between the feedback modalities as determined by a one-way ANOVA test. However, a practical difference when playing the game was found. The respondents who used the combined feedback method performed better in the game. On average, the respondent learned to identify seven out of twelve braille characters and was able to read one out of five words in braille print. The study concluded that the game could be played autonomously and that the feedback modalities could be used separately or in combination with each other without affecting the knowledge post-test.