A Tool for Arabic Handwriting Training

The percentage of people who produce a neat and clear handwriting is declining sharply. The traditional approach for handwriting teaching is to have a dedicated teacher for long hours of handwriting practice. Unfortunately, this is not feasible in many cases. In this paper we introduce an automated tool for teaching Arabic handwriting using tablet PCs and on-line handwriting recognition techniques. This tool can simulate the tasks performed by a human handwriting teacher of detecting the segments of hypothesized writing errors and producing instructive real time feedback to help the student to improve his handwriting quality. The tool consists of two main components, the guided writing component and the free writing component. In the guided writing mode the student is required to write over transparent images for the training examples to limit his hand movements. After the student acquires the basic skills of handwriting he can practice the free writing mode where he writes with his own style, as he usually does in his daily handwritings. The first version of the tool was tested in several schools for children with edge ranging 7-12. The results are promising and show that this tool can help students to analyze their own writing and understand how they can improve it.