ASAB: a Chinese screen reader

Abstract

This paper describes the design and development of a computer interface for blind and visually‐impaired users, who are native speakers of Cantonese (i.e. a Chinese dialect). Apart from enabling the interface to (1) produce Chinese voice output, (2) convert Chinese characters to Braille codes, (3) facilitate Chinese Braille input, and (4) operate in a Microsoft Chinese Windows environment, the significant aspects of this paper include the following: (1) the description of an integrated architecture, which can be used for other languages; (2) a general bilingual Braille input mechanism; (3) a sentence‐based input method that can be used for contracted‐Braille‐to‐text conversion with an error rate of about 6%, operating at about 700 characters/second using a Pentium II 300 MHz PC; (4) a code‐mixed synthesis module for general bilingual and multilingual applications; (5) the potential to directly adopt the system for use with other ideographic languages (like Japanese and Korean), as well as agglutinating languages like Finnish and Turkish, which have no space between words. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Accessible presentation of information for people with visual disabilities

“…Without sufficient prosodic cues for perceiving and evaluating the context of the information being presented, long streams of speech can be difficult for the listener to understand. Today, while there is still work to do on prosodic processing, there are text to speech systems available in many Latin, Germanic and other languages including: English, German, French [200,201], Italian [47,48], Japanese [222] and Chinese [116,117]. While it is well-understood how to prepare such a system, there are still documents which remain unavailable to people with visual disabilities.…”