Enhanced Vision Aid for Low Vision Tertiary Students

Education is one of the essential contributors to development in society. Unlike informal education that can be carried out in many forms, formal education requires structured learning processes. Unfortunately, low vision students find it difficult to fit into these structures in tertiary institutions. This is because they need extra aid to manage the numerous tasks in school. The existing aids for these students are expensive and discourages most of them from pursuing higher education. To solve this problem, we present a Realtek AMB82-based, battery powered, low-cost, and portable live streaming aid to help these students read content being shared during class lectures. The video was shot with the JXF37 1080p resolution camera having a 30-fps frame rate. The video stream was transmitted over Wi-Fi with a chunked transfer encoding technique over HTTP. A user interface was designed using basic HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to view and apply preferred image enhancement filters to support reading. This device was able to help a low vision student read contents about three meters far from the whiteboard. The device has close to no running costs and is thus a sustainable product for society. By introducing this to many universities we can increase the number of low vision students that access higher education.