College students with very poor vision have had to struggle to see a blackboard and take notes—basic tasks that can hold some back. Now a team of four students from Arizona State University has designed a system, called Note-Taker, that couples a tablet PC and a video camera, and could be a major advance over the small eyeglass-mounted telescopes that many students have had to rely on. It recently won second place in Microsoft’s Imagine Cup technology competition.
There are roughly 75,000 students at colleges and trade schools who are visually impaired. The telescopes allow students with low vision to see the blackboard, but they can only focus on one section at a time. Then they have to take off the telescope, write notes, and then go back to the board and try and catch up with the lecture.
David S. Hayden, who graduated from Arizona State in May, understands these challenges—he can only read texts if he gets about two inches away from the material. Mr. Hayden, the lead designer of Note-Taker, says he faced a “morbid tradeoff” in class. Using the assistive technology that was available to him, he could either take notes or listen and absorb the information, but never both. After he had to withdraw from three senior-level math classes, he says, “I realized the existing technologies weren’t going to assist my needs, so I had a project on my hands.”
The result was Note-Taker, which connects a tablet PC (a laptop with a screen you can write on) to a high-resolution video camera. Screen commands get the camera to pan and zoom. The video footage, along with audio, can be played in real time on the tablet and are also saved for later reference. Alongside the video is a space for typed or handwritten notes, which students can jot down using a stylus. That should be helpful in math and science courses, says Mr. Hayden, where students need to copy down graphs, charts, and symbols not readily available on a keyboard.
Mr. Hayden built a prototype of the device with the help of John A. Black Jr., a researcher specializing in computing and human visual perception at the university’s Center for Cognitive Ubiquitous Computing. The project was then awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation and refined with the help of Michael Astrauskas, Shashank Srinivas, and Qian Yan, who are Arizona State students.
“It’s unlike what I’ve seen,” says Clara Van Gerven, an access-technology content specialist with the National Federation of the Blind. The handwriting feature seems valuable, and she has not seen it in other computer-compatible video-recording systems. Note-Taker, she says, “uses existing technology to its advantage and then adds the rewind feature and the manual note-taking to that. It seems like it would be a useful tool.”
But no tool can replace institutional support, says Chris S. Danielsen, director of public relations for the federation. “The university is always going to have to make sure that whatever technology it uses is accessible to blind and low-vision students,” he says. (Arizona State U. has gotten in hot water in the past in just this area.)
The team continues to develop the Note-Taker—a fourth-generation model is already in the works—and is looking into ways to get it on the market. Though the prototype is prohibitively expensive, the designers hope to bring the price tag down to $1,000 per camera unit (the tablet PC would be purchased separately), so that it will be affordable to more consumers. Their second-place finish a few weeks ago in the Imagine Cup’s software-design category may also attract some interest.
Mr. Hayden is starting graduate school in the fall at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He’s taking one of the Note-Taker models with him to use when classes resume.
