Experiences from Running a Voice-Based Education Platform for Children and Teachers with Visual Impairments

Abstract

India has the world’s largest population of children with vision impairments (CVIs), a group facing significant educational barriers including inadequate accessible resources, limited school access, and a shortage of trained teachers. The authors from four different organizations including a non-profit dedicated to enhancing STEM education for CVIs through interactive, play-based learning and teacher training have collaborated to create SEEDS, Scalable Educational Experiences with Digital Scaffolding. This is a voice-based platform for educational experiences delivery, featuring an Android Teacher App, an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system, and a comprehensive website for content management. The Teacher app facilitates educational experiences via group calls with students, while the IVR system offers students independent access to educational content using feature phones. To assess effectiveness and usability of SEEDS among students and teachers, we conducted a mixed-methods study involving 29 visually impaired students across five schools and five facilitators (3 sighted and 2 visually impaired) from Vision Empower Trust . Despite challenges like internet connectivity issues causing call drops, the study highlighted strong student engagement and a collaborative environment among facilitators. By open-sourcing the SEEDS codebase, we aim to improve the platform and increase its adoption among teachers in schools for CVIs across India and beyond.