Homer II-man-machine interface to internet for blind and visually impaired people

  • Authors:

  • Nikola PavešIć;Jerneja Gros;Simon DobrišEk;France Mihelič

  • Affiliations:

  • Laboratory of Artificial Perception, Systems and Cybernetics, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, University of Ljubljana, Traška 25, SI-1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia;Laboratory of Artificial Perception, Systems and Cybernetics, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, University of Ljubljana, Traška 25, SI-1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia;Laboratory of Artificial Perception, Systems and Cybernetics, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, University of Ljubljana, Traška 25, SI-1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia;Laboratory of Artificial Perception, Systems and Cybernetics, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, University of Ljubljana, Traška 25, SI-1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia

  • Venue:
  • Computer Communications
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

HOMER II is a voice-driven text-to-speech system developed for blind or visually impaired persons for reading Slovenian texts. Users can obtain texts from the Internet site of the Association of Slovenian Blind and Visually Impaired Persons Societies from their Electronic Information System where they can find daily newspapers, some novels and other information. The system consists of four main modules. The first module enables Internet communication, retrieves text to a local disc and converts it to a standard form. The input interface manages the keyboard entry and/or speaker independent speech recognition. The output interface performs speech synthesis of a given text and in addition prints the same text magnified to the screen. The user dialog is responsible for the user friendly communication and controls other tasks of the system. Homer II was ported from Linux to the MS Windows 9x/ME/NT/2000 operating systems. For the best performance it uses multi-threading and other advantages of the 32-bit environment. Further versions of the HOMER system with even more advanced dialogue modules and some basic World Wide Web browsing functionality will represent an important tool in the distance learning and teaching process for the impaired persons using academic networks.