TextReader: An Intelligent System for People with Visual Impairment

Visual impairment is a vision loss caused by trauma, disease, and congenital or degenerative conditions. This disability condition makes visual impairment people difficult or even could not understand the textual information at all. The objective of the research is to develop "TextReader", an intelligence system to help people with visual impairment in Indonesia to increase their accessibility on textual information. "TextReader" combines Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Text- to-speech Synthesizer (TTS) which converts image input - as scanning result of the textual document- into character symbols, then from character symbols into voice. All the system were developed based on Free Open Source Software policy, thus can be used by the visual impaired at no cost. Preliminary experiments demonstrated the performance of "TextReader" by perfectly recognized two documents in Bahasa Indonesia and converted the result into audio format.