AUTOMATIC SPEECH RECOGNITION TECHNOLOGY AND THE SUPPORT OF STUDENTS WITH SPECIAL NEEDS

Rich-media describes a broad range of digital interactive media that is increasingly used in the Internet and also for the support of education, where the complex rich-media visualization of the educational process becomes the necessity for the overall transfer of information from teacher to students. Rich-media technologies are used for the support of students with special needs mainly at the development of 'barrier-free' information access to records of presentations which are adapted to needs especially in students of locomotive, visual and aural disability. SWOT analysis of these services determined also future development of MERLINGO (MEdia-rich Repository of LearnING Objects) project and the MIN-MAX strategy of its progress was chosen. Therefore, new objectives of the project involving support of students with special needs have been specified and implemented. The stated needs are focused on the area of the automatic recognition of teacher's speech in real time and its transcription into a text form in order to support students with aural disability at lectures and practical training, followed by automation of sub-titling of video-records made by rich-media technologies and browsing in them in real time according to entered key words while using the programming system NovaVoice and Automatic Speech Recognition technology.