A virtual environment to help deaf students with written language

Abstract

The environment developed in 'visual basic' and PostgreSQL, helps deaf students in the construction of sentences in the Portuguese language respecting their rules of writing. Its design is passed by the interaction between the multidisciplinary team of teachers and a researcher. We identified the characteristics and profiles of deaf students. Videos show how the phrases must be created (one for each sentence), based on images (photos) that illustrate the situation. The environment was divided into five stages with levels of increasing difficulty. The first phase shows a gap to be filled with the suggested words for choice, in the second phase are two gaps, in the third stage are three gaps and in the fourth phase are four gaps. The fifth phase calls for the development of a sentence without words for the choice, only a video gives instructions. Copyright © 2013 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.