Problems facing visually impared and blind people
In this chapter we have discussed the conclusion, implication in informatics, method evaluation, result evaluation, possibilities to generalize and ideas for the continued research.
Conclusions
There are many problems for visually impaired and blind people in society, they faces many type of hurdles in performing every day routine works, the barrier of low vision not let them to become part of this society. They also feel embarrassment many times while performing these tasks when they are unsuccessful in performing or completing them, because of their visual impairment deficiency. It is great blessing of God, if anyone have perfectly 6/6 eye sights and one should be thankful to God for this. The visually impaired user is like that person whom we can say that lost his/her way on journey and don’t know where and how to pass easy life. The humans are a sharp minded creation in the world; due to which technology contributes a lot to fill this gap between society and visually impaired people. Day by day advancements in the field of science introduces new technologies for benefits of normal and handicap persons to make the life easy and comfortable. The inventors should also keep this thing in mind that the people with visual impairment and other type of disabilities should also be facilitated, because they are also part of society, we can’t ignore them as a human being.
There are many types of hurdles during reservation of ticket system for visually impaired and blind people. At present the current ticketing systems are not mature enough for visually impaired users. Only the normal users can be benefited out of this, whereas the visually impaired user needs help of other people. One can say very confidently that today’s ticket vending machines are not user friendly for all type of users. In ticket vending systems there are two important aspects for visually impaired users which are how to feed data and how to get the results.
The usability, actability user-centered aspects should be considered while the designing of ticketing machines for visually impaired users. The features of the ticket vending system those are important for the visually impaired users are used in prototypes which we have designed with screen shots in appendix. We have used the human avatar (interactive artificial agent) for the vocal interaction with the users, which can interact in friendly environment with visually impaired user to complete the task of purchasing tickets. The user can therefore feed data to the system and get the result from the machine. The input and output functions should work in parallel way during the interaction of user and machine. For the input to the system there should be special keyboard (Braille) for visually impaired users from which the user can input to the system like user’s name and other details. There should be information button on each page, so if the user is having any problem at any stage, the user can get the help any time during the interaction. The users who don’t want to operate the system with vocal interaction can use the zooming options to make the things more visible for their understanding. The zooming option should also be available on every screen interface.
Implications for Informatics
It is worth mentioning that the Implications for informatics, is the basic purpose to know how ticket vending system is related to the field of informatics, and how it would be helpful for the society. Our research area contributes a very important role in the field of informatics, because informatics deals with the field of development and use of information systems. In our thesis ticket reservation system is a box of information system, artificial intelligence, and most important thing is that its foundation is based on informatics. You can say that the human beings are experts in informatics and have all the information and functionality of ticket reservation machine like how the user can communicate with the machine, to find the price and buy ticket of each travel from any source to required destination, to find each bus or train number, which route and schedule it follows, as well as time of each and every bus or train. The main goal is to give services to the society which includes members of handicapped society and make it easy for them to buy ticket with the help of informatics.
The ticket reservation has also the same goal or task as humans who are serving for 24 hours. To provide its service to the society, and give the people information as well as option to buy ticket from themselves without help of other person. As mention above, the ticketing machine gives you all the information and tickets about travelling from one city to another. It can tell you travel’s starting and final timing as well as total travelling time, route, price of ticket and as well as allows the payment. All this is related to processing which depends on computers and this thing is also putting effects on the businesses so we can say that the field is related to informatics and artificial intelligence. Main purpose of the informatics is to serve humanity and society.
Our thesis is basically for the affect people of society, and who can’t be ignored at all. We can’t say that the people who have physical deficiency in their body are not part of the society. We believe that these people are more important than the normal human beings because they more deserved more care due to their disability. We should try to do something different for them to make their life easier because these people have lots of problem and feel themselves cut off from the society. They should not be allowed to feel that they are burden on the society. The informatics did a lot for the visually impaired people by filling the gap which existed between normal and visually impaired people, by providing many assistive technologies for the disables. We also believe that, if we can’t serve the humanity with the help of informatics then it is useless for us.
Method Evaluation
The main purpose of method evolution is to sort out appropriate properties of different subject area and relate them to our own research area. The methods in our research work and interview questions make it is possible for us to relate it to current and previous research works. For understanding the problems and difficulties, related to our subject area, we used different concepts and theories from different subject area and relate them with our work. We also coped with problem in merging those methods into our subject area as a whole. Sometime it shows common character with each other, but the best approach of satisfaction for us was to make it relate to the interviews and observations from visually impaired users, which were of great importance for us, otherwise our thesis would be useless for us. For that we explained previously how we conducted interviews, which were very successful according to our expectations, which also make it easy for us to merge and related to our research work.
To verify and make authentic theoretical research work, we conducted interviews and observations. Which make it possible for us to relate and gather it, with help of visually impaired and experienced user of ticket vending machines, those have some relation with related topic from one aspect or from other aspect. We got answers of all our questions which were necessary for us to fill the gap of interaction between the system and the user through interviews, observations and through research.
In theoretical study, we have indicated many subject areas to get the answers of our research questions. The theoretical study only answers the question logically, but to get the answers practically. It is required to conduct the empirical study.
In theoretical study the subject areas that we studied were most of the time according to our research questions. We found it difficult to find any specific or same subject area related to our research. This might be due to the fact that nothing is written about the ticketing machine for visually impaired people. We feel this thing really missing in the theoretical study.
For the verification of the aspects that were indicated in the theoretical study. We performed empirical study in form of interviews and observations. The empirical study was necessary, because we could not find any specific subject area in theoretical study. The interviews and observations were very good, and we are satisfied with them, but we feel that the number of interviews and observations from the visually impaired people was quite small. We believe that we got the information that we required, it would be more appropriate that we could get more interviews and observations.
Result Evaluation
The evaluation method that described in chapter 2 was based on the
Validity
Data quality
Feedback
The validity describes the subjective nature of the data collection and the analysis. We produced some results from the theoretical study, validate them by the help of the empirical study, because we might have misinterpreted some aspects or are misunderstood something during theoretical study that might not be the actual fact in reality, so it is very important to validate the results. We have also validated the prototypes that we developed from few visually impaired people, to evaluate our final results, and the results were satisfactory for us because the users were satisfied, but it can be further improved upon.
The data quality reveals us that data collected is in detailed and varied enough to provide us with a complete picture of what is going on and what processes are involved. We have tried to ensure the quality in the data with the help of the theoretical study. In which we have tried to study as much as we can, about the related subject areas. We have then conducted the empirical study and at the end we evaluated our results from the core actors (visually impaired) in the research to check the quality of the results.
Feedback is the most important part for the result evaluation and validating the results of the findings, because there is always a possibility of misinterpreting the meaning of what participants say in the empirical part either by misunderstanding the answer of any question, during the interviews or by wrongly perceiving the observation. The Feedback will imply the gathering and the feedback about the conclusions from the participants. We have tried to check that our interpretation make sense to the visually impaired people, by making them to go through by the prototypes and provide the feedback about how they perceive such prototype.
Evaluation of any system consists of two of types:
Green box evaluation
Black box evaluation
Green box evaluation is the evaluation of each individual component of a system. The evaluation of a system as a whole is called as Black box evaluation (Michael F. Mctear, 2002).
We cannot use black box evaluation or evaluation of the system as a whole because our results are not working prototypes; these are just screen shots of a prototype. Instead, the evaluation of the individual components or individual screen shots is based on the answers of the evaluator, which is specified by evaluator and comparing that by our own assumptions. We cannot evaluate the results from any mathematical formula as we haven’t used quantitative approach. We have evaluated the results from our target groups and get the feedback from the users, and then we made few minor changes according to their feedback.
“It is important that the study is guided by good ethics and that a survey has a high ethical value.”(Ann Lind, 2005) i.e. it is very important for the researcher should not add or remove some parts for the researchers’ own purpose, because that might results in the aspects which are not real or other than the facts. (Ann Lind, 2005). It is our duty to follow good ethical values during the study especially when we made interviews and observations because some of the respondents were not normal humans, they have some disabilities. We have made this thing sure to the users that the respondent will be kept anonymous and we don’t think that our study is affected by this fact.
Possibilities to Generalize
The purpose of our research work is to make awareness in researchers that they can concentrate on visually impaired or blind people as well as for the people with other disabilities. There are many interactive ticket machines for the normal people but there is no option for specific people with disabilities. It is good for society as well as for the organizations to boost up their business. It can help different business organization also, but the bad luck is that they have no expenses or good ideas or you can say no concentration on handicapped people. The results can be used at cash machines, ticket vending machines, information kiosks, charity kiosk machines, rental kiosks, internet kiosks and printing kiosk machines etc. The companies can merge these ideas into different kiosk machines to make their business at peak as well as serve humanity and society. Our thesis has both tangible and intangible assets according to business aspects as well as for the society. We believe that our little but sincere efforts can force researches to do something better than our work practically.
Ideas for continued research
For continue research according to our idea, there are many things which are still have a big gap between visually impaired people and machine as well as society. Further research is required to make idea more appropriate and bring under the usage of visually impaired people. It is not easy to concentrate on all issues related to the visually impaired people. On the idea about this specific type of ticket kiosk machines for specific type of people, we suggest that the machines should be at their care centers where the visually impaired people spent most of the time of a day, so they can get familiar with it and can easily tackle that how it works. If there is machine for these people to serve them and if they are not familiar with it, it will create problems for them while communicating with it, for first time and for every time they will use it. To invent something is not a big effort but the question that how the user would use that invention
The idea, which we have leave out because it might not fit in our current investigation is that to put these prototypes in real working machines, so it can work and serve the humans and society practically. We also want to do the same kind of work for all or most types of handicapped people, which was not possible for us this time.
