New Perspectives in Science Education

Unlike other alphabetic languages, Chinese is a pictogram language that implies visual messages. For congenital visually impaired students, due to loss of the most important visual senses, it is often found that visually impaired students have lots of typing errors, which cause them difficulty in higher education and employment. It is imperative for the visually impaired students to have the Chinese Computer input skill in their written communication with other sighted people.

To shorten the digital divide, an e-learning web-based platform was developed for visually impaired students using the instructional materials of learning Chinese computer input method as an example in this study. Besides the instructional materials of 25 video units, a self-assessment model, and learning process recorded data are provided for learners and teachers to understand the learner’s performance in the platform. This study will also describe how we combine the concept of integrated education and the design of series of e-learning unit, finally, we interviewed the visually impaired expert with years of teaching experience to assess the usability of this platform.