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Note-taker 2.0: the next step toward enabling students who are legally blind to take notes in class

Published: 25 October 2010 Publication History

Abstract

In-class note-taking is a vital learning activity in secondary and post-secondary classrooms. The process of note-taking helps students stay focused on the instruction, forces them to cognitively process what is being presented, and better retain what has been taught, even if they never refer to their notes after the class. However, note-taking is difficult for students with low vision, or who are legally blind for two reasons. First, they are less able to see what is being presented at the front of them room, and second, they must repeatedly switch between the far-sight task of viewing the front of the room, and the near-sight task of taking notes. This paper describes ongoing research aimed at developing a portable assistive device (called the Note-Taker) that a student can take to class, to assist in the process of taking notes. It describes the principles that have guided the development of the proof-of-concept Note-Taker prototype and the Note-Taker 2.0 prototype. Initial testing of those prototypes has been encouraging, but some significant problems remain to be solved. Proposed solutions are currently being implemented, and appear to be effective. If ongoing usability testing confirms their effectiveness, they will be implemented on the planned Note-Taker 3.0 prototype.

References

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R. Peper and R. Mayer, "Note taking as a generative activity," Journal of Educational Psychology, vol. 70, pp. 514--522, 1978.
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J. Hartley and I. Davies, "Note-taking: A critical review," Innovations in Education and Teaching International, vol. 15, pp. 207--224, 1978.
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D. Hayden, et al., "Note-Taker: Enabling students who are legally blind to take notes in class," in 10th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2008), Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, 2008, pp. 81--88.
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Cited By

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  • (2024)Towards Designing Digital Learning Tools for Students with Cortical/Cerebral Visual Impairments: Leveraging Insights from Teachers of the Visually ImpairedProceedings of the 26th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility10.1145/3663548.3675636(1-18)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2024
  • (2022)Accessibility-Related Publication Distribution in HCI Based on a Meta-AnalysisExtended Abstracts of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3491101.3519701(1-28)Online publication date: 27-Apr-2022
  • (2020)Robots for Inclusive Play: Co-designing an Educational Game With Visually Impaired and sighted ChildrenProceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3313831.3376270(1-13)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2020
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cover image ACM Conferences
ASSETS '10: Proceedings of the 12th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility
October 2010
346 pages
ISBN:9781605588810
DOI:10.1145/1878803
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 25 October 2010

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Author Tags

  1. lecture notes
  2. legal blindness
  3. low vision
  4. note-taker
  5. note-taking

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ASSETS '10
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Overall Acceptance Rate 436 of 1,556 submissions, 28%

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Towards Designing Digital Learning Tools for Students with Cortical/Cerebral Visual Impairments: Leveraging Insights from Teachers of the Visually ImpairedProceedings of the 26th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility10.1145/3663548.3675636(1-18)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2024
  • (2022)Accessibility-Related Publication Distribution in HCI Based on a Meta-AnalysisExtended Abstracts of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3491101.3519701(1-28)Online publication date: 27-Apr-2022
  • (2020)Robots for Inclusive Play: Co-designing an Educational Game With Visually Impaired and sighted ChildrenProceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3313831.3376270(1-13)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2020
  • (2018)“Bursting the Assistance Bubble”Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3173574.3173920(1-14)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2018
  • (2018)A Highly Accurate and Reliable Data Fusion Framework for Guiding the Visually ImpairedIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2018.28171646(33029-33054)Online publication date: 2018
  • (2015)Toward a platform to support vocational training of people with disabilitiesIBM Journal of Research and Development10.1147/JRD.2015.245302159:6(2:1-2:7)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2015
  • (2015)Person-centered accessible technologies and computing solutions through interdisciplinary and integrated perspectives from disability researchUniversal Access in the Information Society10.1007/s10209-014-0369-914:3(415-426)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2015
  • (2014)AVD-LVProceedings of the 16th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers & accessibility10.1145/2661334.2661353(287-288)Online publication date: 20-Oct-2014
  • (2013)An interdisciplinary approach to the design, development and deployment of person-centered accessible technologies2013 International Conference on Recent Trends in Information Technology (ICRTIT)10.1109/ICRTIT.2013.6844294(750-757)Online publication date: Jul-2013
  • (2012)Person-centered accessible technologiesProceedings of the 2012 ACM workshop on User experience in e-learning and augmented technologies in education10.1145/2390895.2390897(1-6)Online publication date: 2-Nov-2012
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