Psychological characteristics of visual information perception of students with visual deprivation in training to work on a personal computer

This article discusses how children with profound sight impairment perceive visual information from a computer screen by means of synthesized speech, and describes research of characteristics of user skills development in children with visual deprivation. We provide the most significant results of research and a number of methodical recommendations on educating children of this category in work on the personal computer without visual control.

Those who are not experiencing difficulties related to impaired sight most often don’t think of how the processes of perception and of visual information are car­ried out in a blind person. As a result, the considerable part of information envi­ronment is inaccessible or has essential restrictions for people with a visual depri­vation. When interacting with visually organized environment a blind person needs a mediator to promote transformation of visual stimuli into accordingly acceptable modality. In some cases, transformation can be distorted due to subjective evalua­tions and judgment of the mediator (for example, picture description).

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