Virtual environments supporting group work between sighted and visually impaired pupils

Group work can be especially challenging for pupils with severe visual impairment, as they are usually the only visually impaired pupil in their class and often do not share materials with the sighted pupils. This creates problems with common ground and has been shown to lead to the exclusion of visually impaired pupils from parts of the work. The main goal of this project is to develop collaborative digital learning environments, based on haptics and audio, which include visually impaired pupils in the group work to as a high degree as possible. The focus is on iterative design in collaboration with sighted and visually impaired pupils, teachers and participating need-owner representatives. Interviews and workshops are conducted for an initial needs’ analysis. In addition to concrete examples of learning environments where sighted and visually impaired pupils can collaborate, guidelines are also developed for future design of collaborative digital learning environments