Review on Assistive Reading Framework for Visually Challenged

Objective of this paper is to review various approaches used for providing the assistive reading framework for the visually challenged persons. Visually challenged persons are the persons who are either blind or having any kind of difficulty in reading any printed material to acquire the domain knowledge. A lot of research is being done for visually challenged to make them independent in their life. We want to study the existing assistive technology for visually challenged and then propose a robust reading framework for visually challenged. The discussed reading framework will help the visually challenged person to read normal printed books, typed documents, journals, magazines, newspapers and computer displays of emails, Web pages, etc., like normal persons. It is a system based on image processing and pattern recognition using which visually challenged person carries or wears a portable camera as a digitizing device and uses computer as a processing device. The camera captures the image of the text to be read along with the relevant image and data. An optical character recognition (OCR) system segregates the image into text and non-text boxes, and then, the OCR converts the text from the text boxes to ASCII or text file. The text file is converted to voice by a text-to-speech (TTS) converter. Thus, blind person would ‘hear’ the text information that has been captured. So this technology can help the visually challenged to read the captured textual information independently which will be communicated as voice signal output of a text-to-speech converter.