Smart Reader for Visually Challenged Using Optical Character Recognition and Text-To-Speech

Abstract

Assistive technology uses assistive, adaptive and rehabilitative devices for people with disabilities. It’s assessed there are about 36 million people with visual impairment in the world and a further 216 million who lead life with moderate to severe visual impairments. Leveraging technology has helped the visually challenged in carrying out tasks on par with the people blessed with vision particularly in the activities of reading and writing. In the proposed work, an image scanning device attached to a microcontroller is designed. This device is designed in the form of hand gloves for ease of usage. The glove with the camera at the fingertip, when rolled over lines of text, scans the information and converts it into digital text with Optical Character Recognition (OCR). The converted digital text is finally read aloud using Text-to-speech synthesis. The results obtained were accurate and met the standards of operability.