Development of a speaking e-book system for visually impaired persons

Abstract

Speaking E-Book system is specially designed for visually impaired persons to allow them to listen to what desires to read. System, users only need to use their own voice to command and control the operations without requiring any other inputting device. In order to broaden area of contact to acquire knowledge for users, the system is integrated with e-mail and Internet capabilities allowing users to enjoy benefit of the up-to-date technology, Internet and E-Mail. As a result, the whole system can be divided into three sessions - E-Book, E-Mail and Internet session. In the E-Book session, there are two E-Books, "Basic law of Hong Kong" and "Romeo and Juliet", included for users to read. "Basic law of Hong Kong" is presented by a user-defined voice to speak out the book¡¦s content. However, "Romeo and Juliet" is a play script chosen to increase users' interest in reading. In other words, the whole E-Book / "Romeo and Juliet" is dialogue based that each character has his/her own voice to speak out each script line. In the E-Mail session, through speech medium users can send e-mail by inputting subject, e-mail address and content. Besides sending e-mail, users can receive e-mail from others, read all e-mail within the mailbox and reply these e-mails as he/she wishes. For the last Internet session, users can input any universal resource identifier into the system and it will try to filter out some unwanted materials e.g. HTML tag or web programming script. Then, speak out the Internet text resource for user.