Dr Jackie YAN Xiu of CityU’s Department of Linguistics and Translation scooped a silver medal at the Inventions Geneva Evaluation Days (IGED) 2021, a virtual edition of the International Exhibition of Inventions of Geneva held in March, with her project “IPA Guide for Visually Impaired Learners”.
Standing for International Phonetic Alphabet, IPA is a set of standardised symbols for the representation of all the possible sounds in the world’s languages. It serves as the foundation for people to study phonetics and languages. However, the process of learning the shapes of these symbols, let alone retrieving the phonetic facts associated with each of the symbols, poses major obstacles to the visually impaired.
The Guide, developed together by visually impaired and sighted people, is intended to remove this learning barrier. It prints IPA symbols in embossments, allowing visually impaired learners to acquire the symbols’ typographic features through touching. An audio version of the Guide, read by a native English speaker, is provided. There is also an audio description for each IPA symbol to facilitate students’ learning of the typographic features of each symbol. Last but not least, Braille is given for the main content of the Guide, offering an alternative way for the learners to acquire IPA in addition to listening to the audio recordings.
Apart from its practical use, the Guide also serves as an example for designing barrier-free educational resources of other disciplines in the future and highlights the possibilities of creating inclusive classrooms where both visually impaired and sighted students can cooperate. It also demonstrates the importance of the cooperation between researchers and the visually impaired in creating barrier-free content. The availability of this Guide also helps improve the public awareness of accessibility issues.
IGED is one of the biggest global events showcasing innovations and inventions from around the world. It had gone online as a special edition this year due to the pandemic.
