Patent Documents: Facilitating Visually Impaired People in Mathematical Education Through Innovative Solutions

Abstract

A patent is legal protection which gives an inventor the right to exclude others from performing a certain activity in the country of issuance. Innovations in form of patents are very beneficial for societies i.e., economic growth, reducing unemployment, increasing motivation and enhancing educational support. Visually impaired people are also part of society who faced several difficulties during access to educational material. Continual enrichment in technology has yielded a lot of innovative solutions for visually impaired people which have been patented. These solutions are in form of published articles, systems, applications and websites. Researchers can access journals, conferences, book chapters and technical reports easily but normally patents are unused sources of information in education. The main reason behind this is the complex structure of the patents which causes difficulty in reading. The proposed article aims to summarize the patent information in such a way that researchers and developers can easily access the information. Discuss some important patent offices from all over the world, along with their patent tools. A detailed analysis was conducted for patent documents that are of help to visually-impaired people learning mathematics.