BRAILLET

Type of project: National  |  Start date: 30/11/2023  |  End date: 29/11/2025

The BRAILLET project aims to develop an innovative prototype platform that uses state-of-the-art Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) solutions to automatically collect, time-align, analyse, and classify the fine-grained finger movements and the digitised speech productions of adult blind and sighted people tested on a few reading tasks.

The platform, already operational, firstly allows the evaluation of the correspondences and differences between the braille reading strategies used by blind subjects and the black text reading strategies used by normally sighted subjects. In particular, the focus will be on comparing reading skills by extracting reading anticipation indices (eye-voice and finger-voice span), reading speed indices (syllables per second), comprehension indices (accuracy of answers to a questionnaire), decoding ability indices (hesitations, pronunciation errors, self-corrections), and the relationship between these indices and the structure of the underlying text.

The BrailLet project is oriented towards the use of ecological and non-invasive protocols. The experimentation, with regard to the data collection process, will only involve the administration of texts to be read on a tablet screen or on a braille cardboard superimposed on the tablet screen, with the aim of collecting reading data while interfering as little as possible with the execution of the task. At the end of the project, a portion of the collected data (suitably anonymised) will be made available to the scientific community.