5 CONCLUSIONS
It has been discussed that for visually impaired lan-
guage learners, it is both usable and effective to
learn vocabulary and spelling via the auditory chan-
nel within a computer-assisted vocabulary learning
(CAVL) application. Auditory is the prefered access
modality to the computer screen for manyvisually im-
paired people. Unfortunately, this makes spellings of
words invisible. Yet orthography is a major challenge
for many visually impaired people in the L2 class-
room. This explains the need for a CAVL tool which
is designed specifically for auditory output and can
still provide adequate orthographic feedback. In or-
der to design a program that truly reflects the needs of
the target users, they must be involved in the devel-
opment. A prototype of an auditory vocabulary and
spelling trainer (AVoS) has been evaluated with 15 vi-
sually impaired pupils yielding promising results in
terms of the usability of the program. Further, an on-
line survey amongst 88 visually impaired adults pro-
vided insights about the vocabulary study and com-
puter usage habits of the target group. It has been
found that many people find spelling errors in texts
on the computer screen due to mispronounciations of
the screen reader. Finding such as these can be used
in the further development of AVoS. The overall goal
is to provide a CAVL software for visually impaired
users that allows them the same benefits sighted users
receive from traditional software. This e-inclusion
technology could potentially bridge the gap the two
user groups in the realm of computer assisted vocab-
ulary and spelling learning in the L2 classroom.
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