The full or satisfactory perception of the environmental context is probably the most significant factor in describing "quality of life", among other health and social related issues. For people with impaired sense(s), especially those with unrecoverable loss of sight, being able to somehow compensate for sight dependable activities becomes the very meaning of life. Fortunately, contemporary technologies advancement allows for R&D efforts that result in more or less feasible solutions to most of those challenges. With the Internet being accessible to everybody, news and information is available beyond limits. One of the main focuses of the modern science is providing applications and the Web to blind and visually impaired. It is now possible more than ever by the advancements in User-Interfaces (UIs) and assistive technologies. There are already stand-alone text-to-speech screen reader applications that provide application-specific speech output. All these screen readers usually cover widely speaking languages. Understandable, it is also needed for all other languages. This paper depicts an UI model for Albanian speaking blind and visually impaired based on extensive research embracing screen readers analysis, text-to-speech technologies analysis, specially developed text-to-speech generator from Albanian texts, the analysis done on general Albanian texts as well as the basic principles of lexicons creations.  Index Terms-screen readers, speech synthesis, Albanianspeaking blind user interface, interfacing model

The problem for developing a TTS (text-to-speech) is a very active field of research. As the Human-Computer Interfaces (HCI) come of age, the need for a more ergonomic and natural interface than the current one (keyboard, mouse, etc.) is being constantly felt. Talking of natural interfaces, what comes to mind, is sound (speech) and sight (vision). These form the basis of many intelligent systems research like robotics. Moreover, speech can also serve as an excellent interface for visually impaired , or people with motor neuron disorders. In this paper we attempt at developing a TTS system for Albanian Language. A lot of commercial systems are available for many foreign languages (mostly English), but there is yet to be a competitive system available for Albanian language. Although the task of building very high quality, unlimited vocabulary text-to-speech (TTS) system is still a difficult one, with many open research questions, we believe the building of reasonable quality voices for many tasks can serve our needs. Here we have worked with standard Albanian, the most commonly spoken. We hope to easily extend the system to other languages, since there are a lot of underlying similarities between languages. Albanian language being highly phonetic, result in simple letter-to-sound rules. We used the standard concatenative synthesis. The main problem faced by us was to make the synthesized speech sound natural. We investigated the reasons for the mechanical sounding speech and developed different synthesis models to overcome some of those problems. Moreover, we implemented some standard and also novel intonation and duration modification algorithms, which can be incorporated into the TTS at a later stage. Our main achievement was reasonably legible speech with an unlimited vocabulary. The following paper presents a brief overview of the main text-to-speech synthesis problem and its subproblems, and the initial work done in building a TTS for Albanian.