Interaction design for teaching visually impaired students

This paper reports on the findings for a study on improving interaction design for teaching visually impaired students. The crux of the problem is the ability to draw and understand diagrams. The cognitive issues are often underestimated with insufficient attention being given to the use of metaphors, etc. and "one size fits all solutions" are often the norm. The findings of the original seed funded project have led to design criteria and to an application for a large scale project, to produce generic tools and to enable multi-modal teaching and learning, with connotations for the mentally as well as physically impaired.

Singular stresses at the tip of a crack terminating at frictional interface of fibre reinforced composites

The stress singularities at the tip of a crack that terminates at a frictional interface between two layers in anisotropic composites are investigated. The order of stress singularities is determined by solving the characteristic equations obtained from the boundary conditions and the frictional interface conditions for the cases concerned. The interface is assumed to be governed by Coulomb's law of friction. Numerical results are presented for the cases with a crack terminating at a frictional interface of a fibre reinforced composite, and it is shown that there is a big difference of stress singularities between cases with and without considering friction along the interface.