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Top1. Introduction
The world population consists of 285 million people living with visual impairment, out of which 39 million are completely blind. India currently has 12 million blind people against 39 million that makes India home to one-third of the world’s population. The major causes of blind in the youth are birth defects and uncorrected refractive errors (Global Data on Visual Impairment, 2010; Visual Impairment, n.d.). Each year nearly 75000 people lose part or whole of their vision. Global blindness is said to triple by 2050.Visual sensation is vital to a comfortable life, deprivation of which causes a huge issue in performing daily tasks like reading and interpersonal communications to name a few. However, the blind face a major setback in the field of education. The widely used means of education and assistance available for them is braille. Braille is a system of raised dots that can be read with the fingers by people who are blind or have low vision. Blind children with low vision are deprived of braille instruction. Parents often find themselves battling with school administrators to get braille instruction for their children with low vision because of the historical emphasis on teaching these children to read print. With only a tiny proportion of books published available in braille, which is under 1%, they are deprived of reading majority books. Furthermore, there is a shortage of teachers who are qualified to teach braille. This has led to an employment rate of 37% in the blind (Bell & Mino, 2015; Blind World Magazine, 2006). Conventional methods of education are adopted for such pupils in most parts of India. Moreover, in an overpopulated country like India, the low per capita income discourages innovative devices built around the world for improving the lives of visually challenged students. Thus, low cost, robust and smart alternatives are the need of the hour to bridge the gap between the quality of education provided to the blind and others (Brabyn, 2007). It is imperative to view interaction with objects and people around in the same light as reading a book. Beth Hurst et al (2013) in their study of the impact of social interaction on student learning concluded that it greatly enhanced the critical thinking and problem-solving skills of students.
Blindness creates a cycle of illiteracy, poverty and social exclusion for blind children, making them one of the most vulnerable groups in the world. A small number of them receive any kind of education. There are ample examples of eminent personalities like Srikant Bolla(n.d.), Hellen Keller(n.d.), etc. who faced a lot of hurdles in their path to success due to the lack of fair chance at education. In this era of rapid socioeconomic progress, the visually impaired society is neglected of any availability of technology meant for their ease of use and life assistance that comes with a cheap price tag. There is thus a dire need of assistive technology to enable them to learn and live as independently as possible (Caporusso, 2008; Miele, 2010; Velázquez, 2010; Yi & Tian, 2011). This can be achieved with the help of IoT (Internet of Things) and deep learning methodologies which provide the tools and techniques to develop a smart and efficient system.