A talking newspaper for the visually-impaired
In recent years, technology has played an important role in "enabling" disabled persons, improving their quality of life. The DUMAS project, funded through the EU's Information Society Technologies (IST) Programme, continues this legacy. The Athos platform was developed within the DUMAS project to support a number of speech software applications. A "talking newspaper", the AthosNews, was developed using the platform in order to assist visually-impaired persons. The user is able to navigate through the newspaper using voice commands. Article titles can be retrieved via a search mechanism. Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) of the user's voice is achieved with Nuance grammar. Similar services that are currently available are not automated, but rather depend on labor-intensive recordings of human voices. Hence, the AthosNews heralds a new era for the visually-impaired, particularly in terms of the quantity of content available. With respect to user acceptance, the AthosNews prototype was put to the test in a series of trials. A remarkable finding was that even users skilled at keypad navigation preferred the voice control method. Delivery of the service could either take place over the telephone or through a PC connected to the Internet. The University of Manchester is pursuing exposure of the AthosNews through journal publications. For more information about the DUMAS project, click at: http://www.sics.se/dumas/(opens in new window)