SlAide2Voice: a new educational tool for students with visual disabilities

Online lessons had become more and more frequent and this new way of teaching, forced by the Covid-19 epidemic, implies many problems for all of the students and above all for those ones affected by disabilities. It is therefore absolutely necessary to address this issue and provide practical solutions for it. This paper proposes SlAIde2Voice, a new software pipeline architecture to help visually impaired students to overcome some difficulties related to online lessons. Our aim is to develop a tool, based on three simple components, a client–server architecture, an OpenOffice add-on and an artificial intelligence module, which will be able to help visually impaired students not only during online lessons, but also during their independent study. The proposed methodology promises to improve the learning quality of students with visual difficulties and aims to improve their inclusion and independence. SlAIde2Voice will be designed to be used together with any existing videoconference tools and its use can also be extended to conferences and meetings in general.