Study on aural message service by text coding for visually impaired and blind people

In this paper, we focus on the structure of an aural messaging service system for visually impaired and blind people. The service system provides aural messages as an alternative of visual ones, and consists of certain text-coding software tool and special speech (decoding) device. In usual assistive technology study, we mainly focus upon certain technical device called an assistive device. This is not the case for our aural message service system. The effectiveness of the service system highly depends on the quality of text-coding scheme, and moreover on the recognition of persons who generate an alternative text. We show features of the service system and point out issues that make the system really effective from the viewpoint of use technology, or meta-technology.