Drishti: An Integrated Navigation System for Visually Impaired and Disabled
ISWC '01 Proceedings of the 5th IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computers
A diachronic approach for schwa deletion in Indo Aryan languages
SIGMorPhon '04 Proceedings of the 7th Meeting of the ACL Special Interest Group in Computational Phonology: Current Themes in Computational Phonology and Morphology
Alternative information web for visually impaired users in developing countries
IBM Journal of Research and Development
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
In this paper, we extend work examining the issues in language support for screen readers for vision-impaired computer users by building and testing a Hindi-language text-to-speech interface for screen reading. The paper first discusses the importance of 'mechanical voice' screen reading for the ICTD community in an environment where many 'natural voice' options are proprietary and expensive. We find that the main criticism against mechanical voice -- the issue of comprehension -- can be overcome by training using familiar metaphors, and that the most persistent problems in audio comprehension are ones that are solvable through technical means. Given the structure of vowel-consonant structure of most Indo-Aryan languages, we argue that mechanical voice audio output holds very significant scope for screen reading for vision impaired populations in India.