Mobile application for vision impaired people to facilitate to learn the English language

Abstract

This paper brings together the development of a mobile application which capable of providing English language guide for vision impaired people. This research work has proposed and implementation of a system called “An English Eye: Way to Learn English as a Vision Impaired Individual” to facilitate blind people to learn English as a secondary language using mobile based application which is capable of translating an English word into its corresponding Sinhala word and vice versa. The system consists of the speech recognizer, translators, a speech synthesizer, gesture interactions and latest technologies that have been applied to make it more accessible for vision-impaired people. Also, to the translator, this system comes with features such as brail input methodologies, character segmentation techniques, speech to text conversation, and so forth. English is a lingua franca which is critical to tertiary education through a substantial amount of learning and teaching materials are available in English. Many academics and researchers have proposed different methodologies to learn English using existing technologies; i.e. educational software, CDs, DVDs, videos, e-mails, internet. Though there are resources, it is still a challenge to learn English as a vision impaired student in the Sri Lankan context due to lack of accessibility issues engaged with resources mentioned above. In addressing this needs, the challenge of building a mobile application to help vision impaired people was taken up.