DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT OF TALKING BRAILLE CALCULATOR

This research focused on the design and development of a Talking Braille Calculator. More specifically, the following were the objectives of the study: specify the technology requirements needed for the development of a Talking Braille Calculator; test the Talking Braille Calculator in terms of its responsiveness, synchronization and accuracy and evaluate the Talking Braille Calculator in terms of effectiveness. The Talking Braille Calculator was developed to help the visually-impaired students to study and SPED teachers to teach the four Mathematical operations with the implementation of Braille Writing system. It was set to provide an advanced tool for the visually-impaired students and teachers of Santa Cruz Central Elementary School (SCES), Sta. Cruz, Laguna. The design of the Talking Braille Calculator used the idea of the conventional calculators with the implementation of Nemeth codes programmed in order to mount the answer through the braille pins attached to the device using a servo motor. The keys, buttons and braille pins can talk when pressed using the pre-recorded voice installed into the voice module. The research resulted to use C Programming Language to program the PIC microcontroller that controls the whole device including the voice module and the servo motor. It can process a whole operation in 13.05 sec. which consist of four digits, and one operator pressed with the result matching the pre-recorded voice and the display. The device obtained 4.903 weighted mean average interpreted as Highly Acceptable evaluated by the visually- impaired students.