Text Reader for Visually Impaired Person

Abstract

Abstract There are approximately 1.3 billion people in the world have visual impairment issue. They usually have to read printed material using Braille. However, there are limitations for these people when the material is not printed in Braille. Although there is much electronic equipment that can help them to read, the prices are too expensive to afford. Thus, this paper proposes an affordable mobile application which is designed for the visually impaired person. The mobile application is able to capture the image of printed material with a mobile camera. The captured image is then converted to text by using image-to-text conversion in Optical Character Recognition (OCR) framework. Finally, the text will be read out into speech format using text-to-speech conversion in Text to Speech (TTS) framework. As a result, a person who has visual impairment can understand the printed material which is not written in Braille through listening instead of touching. Some alert sound is provided to allow the users to know what exactly happened in the mobile application. It is user friendly for the visually impaired person since the designed system has sound for guideline so they can always get to know the process of the application.