BACKGROUND: Braille and text to speech systems have tremendously improved the lives of the visually impaired across the world. However, a large population of the visually impaired people in India is still deprived of getting the benefits of such advancements. This was primarily due to the difference in the technology required for Indian languages compared to those corresponding to other popular languages of the world.
OBJECTIVE: In this paper, we present a design and evaluation of a unified open-source framework that will enable a visually impaired to access and produce information contents in Indian vernaculars with the help of computers.
METHODS: The proposed framework has been designed by keeping constant interaction with the visually impaired people and by keeping in mind their different requirements. The framework is integrated with five different engines namely, a forward and reverse Indian language text to Braille transliteration engine, a Nemmeth editor to convert mathematical expressions into Braille, a tactile converter to convert graphical images into Braille, a voice mailing system to compose and receive voice based emails for the Blinds, and an Indian language file reader with integrated Hindi and Bangla speech synthesis engines.
RESULTS: The framework has been deployed and exhaustively evaluated by people from different Blind schools and organizations for Blinds all over India. The transliteration engines are particularly useful for creating a large volume of Indian language Braille books.
