A multi-sensory interactive reading experience for visually impaired children; a user evaluation.

The children's experience of reading is enhanced by visual displays, and through picture book experiences, young children expose themselves to develop socially, personally, intellectually, and culturally. While a sighted person's mental imagining is constructed mostly through visual experiences, a visually impaired person's mental images are a product of haptic, taste, smell, and sounds. In this paper, we are introducing a picture book with multi-sensory interactions for the visually impaired children. The key novelty in our concept is the integration of multi-sensory interactions (touch, sound, and smell) to create a new reading experience for visually impaired. Also, this concept is highlighting the lack of appropriately designed sensory reading experiences for visually impaired children. We have conducted a user study with 10 educators, and 25 children from a special school for visually impaired in Malaysia, and our evaluation revealed that this book is engaging and a novel experience of multi-sensory interactions to both children and educators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]