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Visually impaired students (VIS) are unable to get visual information, which has made their learning process complicated. This paper discusses the overall situation of VIS in Bangladesh and identifies major challenges that they are facing in getting education. The Braille system is followed to educate blind students in Bangladesh. However, lack of Braille based educational resources and technological solutions have made the learning process lengthy and complicated for VIS. As a developing country, Bangladesh cannot afford for the costly Braille related technological tools for VIS. Therefore, a mobile phone based Braille application, "mBRAILLE", for Android platform is designed to provide an easy Braille learning technology for VIS in Bangladesh. The proposed design is evaluated by experts in assistive technology for students with disabilities, and advanced learners of Braille. The application aims to provide a Bangla and English Braille learning platform for VIS. In this paper, we depict iterative (participatory) design of the application along with a preliminary evaluation with 5 blind subjects, and 1 sighted and 2 blind experts. The results show that the design scored an overall satisfaction level of 4.53 out of 5 by all respondents, indicating that our design is ready for the next step of development.

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The introduction and evaluation of Braille-learning tools are not receiving attention despite the need for talking books and Braille reading materials. As the Braille learning tools are very limited in developing countries, newly introduced tools and technological solutions need to be properly evaluated for implementation with the required improvements. The current study evaluated a smartphone-based interactive application “mBRAILLE†for teaching early Braille-writing skills in English and Bangla. The mBRAILLE is developed to provide a cheap and affordable technology to the visually impaired (VI) students in Bangladesh. The application will help them learn Braille. A two-stage evaluation was performed in Bangladesh to determine the effectiveness of the application. The first stage of evaluation was performed with five school-aged VI children and five teachers from a blind school to determine the satisfaction level of the users while interacting with the application. This evaluation focused on 5 usability criteria, namely, learnability, memorability, efficiency, error, and satisfaction. After using mBRAILLE, participants evaluated the interfaces of the application through a specific questionnaire. Evaluation results showed that mBRAILLE meets the considered usability criteria, indicating that the interaction between application and users was on a desired level of satisfaction. Additionally, teaching ability of the application was evaluated by 5 real users in the second stage of evaluation, with a positive result. Therefore, given that the application is an effective tool to learn and teach English and Bangla Braille, it can be implemented in Bangladesh to assist VI students.