A FAX Reader for the Blind
Allen E. Milewski, Henry S. Baird · 2005
We describe an experiment in which a blind person places arbitrary printed pages in a FAX machine and soon afterwards hears the contents read out loud over the telephone by a synthesized voice. This study focuses on technical issues including the accuracy achievable by stateof -the-art optical character recognition operating on FAX images, methods to improve the intelligibility of synthesized speech for this application, and ease of interaction with the user. In a small-scale trial of the service under laboratory conditions, we have observed that accuracy and intelligibility on some commonly-occurring types of documents, including typewritten letters, is usefully high. We believe that technology developments in the near future will support services acceptable to a wide range of users. 1. Introduction We describe a small-scale exploratory study of a new telecommunications service concept directed at visually-impaired populations, to read hard-copy printed text out loud over the telepho...