Voice Activated E-Learning System for the Visually Impaired

Abstract

E-learning has become an important tool for learners to acquire information and knowledge. However visually impaired people have no or very little access to this tool, since interface suitable to them are unavailable. The Voice Activated E learning System can provide a solution to this problem. Developing this system is meant to assist visually impaired students in learning, a desired subject, from the system, in a convenient way using their voice commands. This system consists of two major subsystems; namely Speaker Verification and Speech Recognition subsystem. In the speaker verification subsystem, Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) is used for Feature extraction and Vector Quantization (VQ) algorithm is used for codebook generation. In the speech recognition subsystem, MFCC and dynamic programming (DP) are used. Experimental results show an accuracy of 96% in speaker verification subsystem and 89% in speech recognition subsystem. INTRODUCTIONThe e-Learning market has been slow in developing courses for use with screen readers, speech recognition software and other adaptive technologies. The technology is there but people can"t use it in a way that could certainly benefit them most. Although present software systems are often very sophisticated and user-friendly they are not very convenient for visually impaired people. The present development in human-computer interaction and spoken language dialog systems brings new hopes. Going one step further, true usability with these technologies must be considered very early in the design process. E-learning has become an important tool for learners to acquire information and knowledge. However visually impaired people have no or very little access to this tool since no interface suitable to them are available. According to WHO, approximately 340 million people in this world are visually impaired. So there is a great need to develop a user friendly easily navigable voice interface to the E-learning environment. The main objective of this work is to create an E learning system that can perform text-independent user verification and as well can respond to speech commands, which allows enhancement of the quality of the interaction between visually impaired user and the e-learning platform.Once the user enrolls into the system, the user will be guided through the system, using audio instructions. The user can choose various options in the system, with the help of speech inputs and few keyboard operations. E-Learning EnvironmentEvery person having physical impairments has an equal right to obtain education. This project presents an alternate use of E-Learning technology to support visually impaired students. The major problem for visually impaired is to access the resources being used in E Learning systems. These people mostly use screen reader software (JAWS, Window-Eyes etc) because Braille is expensive and slow [8].Although the present software systems are often sophisticated and user-friendly, they are usually not very convenient for the visually impair...