Audio Recite Assistance for the Visually Impaired

Abstract

According to recent reports by WHO, globally, about 2.2 billion people have a distance or
near vision impairment. While the bulk of individuals with vision impairment and blindness
are over the age of fifty years; vision loss affects people of all age groups. To distinguish
words, statements, and letters in day-to-day newspapers, magazines and books clearly, are
some of the several important challenges faced by them. This hinders their reading ability
and further disturbs their learning process. As a result, a text reader was created to aid the
visually handicapped in listening to the audio read-back of scanned documents. The texts are
scanned with the help of a scanner and are sent to the application. Easy OCR, an Optical
Character Recognition engine is then used to extract the text from the image. The captured
text is then translated to voice using the Google Text to Speech API, or gTTS API for short.
Along with English, the application supports the regional Indian languages- Hindi and Tamil.