Unbalanced chemical equations conversion to Mark-up format and representation to vision impaired students

Abstract

This paper describes a method to represent unbalanced chemical equations to vision impaired students which allows them to navigate through classified data, such as species, elements, quantity numbers at the left and right hand sides of equations, reactants, and products. Then they can find appropriate coefficients and balance chemical equations without involving to mathematical aspects of balancing and remembering a lot of information. The goal of this research was the development of an application which assists vision impaired students enrolled in chemistry course to be able to read chemistry literature containing formulae, chemistry representations of elements, and other aspects of chemistry that has been difficult in the past to present in a way for vision impaired people to understand. Developed application by this research is an open source command line Bash Script application under Linux which accepts an unbalanced chemical equation as an input, processes, classifies information, and represents it as Mark-up format or Alternative Audio Descriptive using Text to Speech.