• Journal of Korean Library and Information Science Society
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• v.53 no.2
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• pp.1-23
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• 2022

Access to knowledge and information is a universal human right. However, even after the Marrakesh Treaty was adopted on June 27, 2013, only 1-7% of standard printed materials are accessible to people with reading disabilities, including the visually impaired, and library services are very weak. As a result, the book famine of people with reading disabilities continues. This study, focusing on such severe access gaps and inequalities, analyzes Learning Ally and Bookshare in the US, the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) in the UK, Bibliothèque Numérique Francophone Accessible (BNFA) in France, and SAPIE in Japan, which are considered private organizations leading library services for the disabled in major developed countries. And based on the derived implications and the Marrakesh Treaty, a strategic plan was proposed to strengthen the services of the disabled in domestic libraries. It is urgent to enact the 'Act to Resolve Reading Barriers', amend the provisions related to the Copyright Act that restrict library services, strengthen the organizational capacity of the National Library for the Disabled, raise the service index for the disabled in library evaluation, and establish a library cooperation system centered on regional representative libraries and expand services, etc.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
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• 2017.10a
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• pp.391-394
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• 2017

Persons with low vision impairment refers to visual and visual impairments that can not be remedied by medical or optical methods due to inherited or acquired eye disease. People with low vision impairments account for more than 240 million people in the world and have only a few remaining eyesight. We will discuss the improvement of information accessibility of low visually impaired people and future research methods through research on Web UI/UX in mobile web environment for low visibility handicapped in the environment where information can be accessed through existing screen reader (TTS) and screen enlargement function.

• The Journal of Korean Association of Computer Education
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.59-71
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• 2018

The purpose of this study is suggesting the direction for improving web accessibility by analyzing the state of abiding by the web accessibility by the centers for teaching and learning support at the education offices in cities and provinces which provide the learning and teaching materials to the K-12 members and the interested people. For this aim, nine centers for teaching and learning support were evaluated. The primary manual evaluation by two experts and the evaluation by 18 users were conducted. The users were comprised of hearing-impaired people, visually-impaired people, brain-disabled people, the elderly, various browser users, and a variety of operating system users. As a result of the analysis, not a single center for teaching and learning support had conformed to web accessibility in the expert evaluation and the user evaluation. As a result of the expert evaluation, the errors regarding web design improvement, HTML source error correction, and provision of alternative measures for the disabled were found. This study is meaningful in the sense that it provided various discussions with regard to the direction of the future web accessibility evaluation based on the improved web accessibility evaluation method.

• The Journal of Society for e-Business Studies
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.21-31
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• 2018

Korean banknotes are similar in size, and their braille tend to worn out as they get old. These characteristics of Korean banknotes make the blind people, who mainly rely on the braille, even harder to distinguish the banknotes. Not only that, this can even lead to economic loss. There are already existing systems for recognizing the banknotes, but they don't support Korean banknotes. Furthermore, because they are developed as a mobile application, it is not easy for the blind people to use the system. Therefore, in this paper, we develop a Raspberry Pi-based banknote recognition system that not only recognizes the Korean banknotes but also are easily accessible by the blind people. Our system starts recognition with a very simple action of the user, and the blind people can hear the recognition results by sound. In order to choose the best feature extraction algorithm that directly affects the performance of the system, we compare the performance of SIFT, SURF, and ORB, which are representative feature extraction algorithms at present, in real environments. Through experiments in various real environments, we adopted SIFT to implement our system, which showed the highest accuracy of 95%.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea CI
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• v.48 no.2
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• pp.1-8
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• 2011

In this paper, we propose a haptic display system that can convert Braille and tactual map(braille map) to tactile information recognizable through sense of touch almost in real-time. The proposed system consists of a haptic display hardware device, which actually delivers tactile signal to visually impaired people, and a device control software program, which converts Braille and tactile information to tactile signal and transfers it to the hardware device. Experimental evaluations of the proposed system were performed with 10 visually impaired persons. Experimental results show that the proposed system can provide similar Braille recognition rate and speed to those of existing Braille information devices. In addition, the proposed system converts tactile information to tactile signal under maximum 1.1 seconds, so that it can provide graphic information in almost real-time which is not possible with existing tactile devices, such as Braille printer.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.23 no.8
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• pp.1099-1107
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• 2020

The need for customized services providing real-time subway information through mobile devices for the blind using subway as their primary transportation method is becoming more essential. Therefore, this study is aimed at developing a mobile service to provide real-time subway information by displaying with braille and utilizing Dot Watch. The process of real-time subway information guidance mobile service is as follows: the route confirmation stage, the ride waiting & judgment stage, the on-the-go stage, and lastly, the off-road phase & wrong path state. The service provides real-time appropriate information to the visually impaired people for each situation. It receives subway information through API provided by Seoul Metropolitan Government and ODSay API. The service is developed and coded with in Java using Android Studio, and the communicating method with Dot Watch was done using Bluetooth. The usability evaluation was conducted in terms of efficiency, effectiveness, and satisfaction. The evaluation methods mentioned above were carried out by testees, and feedback was given. They assessed that the information provided was useful but still unstable to use the system. It is expected that actual usability will increase if our study is supplemented using voice output function.

• Journal of Korea Society of Industrial Information Systems
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.79-94
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• 2016

Anytime, anywhere, we can be connected through the Internet and obtain information by using the smart device. However, people with disabilities are unable to take advantage of smart IT environment. Many studies pointed out that this has been the cause of the digital divide and social problems. In this study, we conducted an empirical study on the use of smart devices to help the blind acceptance of conduct. According to the study results, innovativeness had the impact on perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, perceived enjoyment, and self-esteem and self-efficacy appeared to affect the perceived ease of use. In addition, the perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, perceived enjoyment affected the intention to re-use. These study results contribute to both theory and practice.

• International Journal of Computer Science & Network Security
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• v.24 no.5
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• pp.1-10
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• 2024

Individuals with visual impairments face numerous challenges in their daily lives, with navigating streets and public spaces being particularly daunting. The inability to identify safe crossing locations and assess the feasibility of crossing significantly restricts their mobility and independence. Globally, an estimated 285 million people suffer from visual impairment, with 39 million categorized as blind and 246 million as visually impaired, according to the World Health Organization. In Saudi Arabia alone, there are approximately 159 thousand blind individuals, as per unofficial statistics. The profound impact of visual impairments on daily activities underscores the urgent need for solutions to improve mobility and enhance safety. This study aims to address this pressing issue by leveraging computer vision and deep learning techniques to enhance object detection capabilities. Two models were trained to detect objects: one focused on street crossing obstacles, and the other aimed to search for objects. The first model was trained on a dataset comprising 5283 images of road obstacles and traffic signals, annotated to create a labeled dataset. Subsequently, it was trained using the YOLOv8 and YOLOv5 models, with YOLOv5 achieving a satisfactory accuracy of 84%. The second model was trained on the COCO dataset using YOLOv5, yielding an impressive accuracy of 94%. By improving object detection capabilities through advanced technology, this research seeks to empower individuals with visual impairments, enhancing their mobility, independence, and overall quality of life.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.17 no.8
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• pp.1025-1032
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• 2014

Until now, there were few supports on reading the mathematical expressions except text based expressions, so it is important to provide the reading of the mathematical expressions. Also, there are various of obstacles for people who are not visually impaired when reading the mathematical expressions such as the situation of presbyopia, reading the mathematical expressions in the vehicles, and so on. Therefore, supports for people to read mathematical expressions in various situations are needed. In the previous research, the main goal was to transform the mathematical expressions into Korean text based on Content MathML. In this paper, we expanded the range of the research from a reading disabilities to people who are not reading disabilities. We tested appropriacy of the rules we made to convert the MathML based expressions into speech and defined 3 math-to-speech rules in korean based on levels. We implemented the mathematical expressions by using 3 math-to-speech rules. We took comprehension test to find out whether our math to speech rules are well-defined or not.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.17 no.9
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• pp.2377-2398
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• 2023

In our daily lives, we engage in a variety of tasks that rely on our senses, such as seeing. Blindness is the absence of the sense of vision. According to the World Health Organization, 2.2 billion people worldwide suffer from various forms of vision impairment. Unfortunately, blind people face a variety of indoor and outdoor challenges on a daily basis, limiting their mobility and preventing them from engaging in other activities. Blind people are very vulnerable to a variety of hazards, including falls. Various barriers, such as stairs, can cause a fall. The Internet of Things (IoT) is used to track falls and send a warning message to the blind caretakers. One of the gaps in the previous works is that they were unable to differentiate between falls true and false. Treating false falls as true falls results in many false alarms being sent to the blind caretakers and thus, they may reject the IoT system. As a means of bridging this chasm, this paper proposes an intelligent shoe that is able to precisely distinguish between false and true falls based on three sensors, namely, the load scale sensor, the light sensor, and the Flex sensor. The proposed IoT system is tested in an indoor environment for various scenarios of falls using four models of machine learning. The results from our system showed an accuracy of 0.96%. Compared to the state-of-the-art, our system is simpler and more accurate since it avoids sending false alarms to the blind caretakers.