ASAB: a Chinese screen reader

  • Authors:

  • R. W. P. Luk;D. S. Yeung;Q. Lu;H. L. Leung;S. Y. Li;F. Leung

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computing, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong;Department of Computing, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong;Department of Computing, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong;Department of Computing, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong;Department of Computing, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong;The Hong Kong Society for the Blind, 248 Nam Cheong Street, Shamshuipo, Kowloon, Hong Kong

  • Venue:
  • Software—Practice & Experience
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

This paper describes the design and development of a computer interface for blind and visually-impaired users, who are native speakers of Cantonese (i.e. a Chinese dialect). Apart from enabling the interface to (1) produce Chinese voice output, (2) convert Chinese characters to Braille codes, (3) facilitate Chinese Braille input, and (4) operate in a Microsoft Chinese Windows environment, the significant aspects of this paper include the following: (1) the description of an integrated architecture, which can be used for other languages; (2) a general bilingual Braille input mechanism; (3) a sentence-based input method that can be used for contracted-Braille-to-text conversion with an error rate of about 6%, operating at about 700 characters/second using a Pentium II 300 MHz PC; (4) a code-mixed synthesis module for general bilingual and multilingual applications; (5) the potential to directly adopt the system for use with other ideographic languages (like Japanese and Korean), as well as agglutinating languages like Finnish and Turkish, which have no space between words.