Portable Text to Speech Converter for the Visually Impaired

Abstract

The portable text to speech converter is designed to help the visually impaired listen to an audio read-back of any scanned text. The system consists of a handheld page scanner, android phone to which the scanned image is sent over Bluetooth, an application to extract the text from the scanned image and to convert the extracted text to speech. The additional advantage of this system is that it employs a page scanner which scans the entire page containing the text. Therefore, the visually impaired need not take photos focusing on the region of text to be read, and then crop it to remove background pictures, which is the case in existing systems. The scanned image may contain text with background pictures which are simply ignored and only the text in the scanned image is extracted by the optical character recognition application. The text may also contain special characters and equations.