Name
Abstract | ||
|---|---|---|
AbstractDisability is an impairment affecting an individual's livelihood and independence. Assistive technology enables the disabled cohort of the community to break the barriers to learning, access information, contribute to the community, and live independently. This article proposes an assistive device to enable people with visual disabilities and learning disabilities to access printed Arabic material in real-time, and to help them participate in the education system and the professional workforce.This proposed assistive device employs Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Text To Speech (TTS) conversion, using concatenation synthesis. OCR is achieved using image processing, character extraction, and classification, while Arabic speech synthesis is achieved through concatenation synthesis, followed by Multi Band Re-synthesis Overlap-Add (MBROLA). Waveform generation in the second phase produces vocal output for the disabled user to hear. OCR character and word accuracy tests were conducted for nine Arabic fonts. The results show that six fonts were recognized with over 60% character accuracy and two fonts were recognized with over 88% accuracy. A Mean Opinion Score (MOS) test for speech quality was conducted. The results showed an overall MOS score of 3.53/5 and indicated that users were able to understand the speech. A real-time usability testing was conducted with 10 subjects. The results showed an overall average of agreements scores of 3.9/5 and indicated that the proposed Arabic reader pen meets the real-time constraints and is pleasant and satisfying to use and can contribute to make printed Arabic material accessible to visually impaired persons and people with learning disabilities. |
Year | DOI | Venue |
|---|---|---|
2021 | 10.1145/3423133 | ACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing |
Keywords | DocType | Volume |
Arabic language, assistive embedded systems, optical character recognition, reader pen, real-time systems, text-to-speech | Journal | 20 |
Issue | ISSN | Citations |
1 | 2375-4699 | 0 |
PageRank | References | Authors |
0.34 | 0 | 3 |
Name | Order | Citations | PageRank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mohammad Alzubaidi | 1 | 2 | 3.75 |
| Mwaffaq Otoom | 2 | 38 | 6.80 |
| Nouran S. Ahmad | 3 | 0 | 0.34 |