Abstract
Background: According to the WHO report, around 4.07% of the world's population is visually impaired. About 90% of the visually impaired users live in the lower economic strata. In the fast technological era, most of the inventions miss the need of these people. Mainly the technologies are designed for mainstream people; visually impaired people are always unable to access it. This inability arises primarily for reasons such as cost, for example, Perkins Brailler costs 80-248 dollars for the simple purpose of Braille input. Another major reason is the hassle of carrying the big equipment.
Objective: Keeping all this in mind and making technology available to their doors, MAGIC-1 has been designed. The goal is to provide a solution in terms of an application, which helps the visually impaired people in their daily life activities.
Method: The proposed solution assists visually impaired users through smartphone technology. If visually impaired users ever wished to have a touched guide in a smartphone, MAGIC-1 has the solution that consolidates all the important features related to their daily activities.
Results: The performance of the proposed technology as a whole and its individual features in terms of usability, utility and other metrics, etc. have been tested based on a sample of visually impaired users. Moreover, performances in term of Errors per Word and Words per Minute have been observed.
Conclusion: MAGIC-I, the proposed solution, works as an assistant of visually impaired users to overcome their daily struggles and let them stay more connected to the world. A visually impaired user can communicate via their mobile devices with features like eyes free texting using braille, voice calling, etc. They can easily take help in an emergency situation with the options of SOS emergency calling and video assistance.
Keywords: Braille, android, application, visually impaired, blind, mobile phone, touch screen.
Graphical Abstract