The Design and Prototyping of Braille to Speech Application as a Self-Learning Support Media for Visually Impaired Person

Abstract

Braille learning is fundamentally essential to the lives of Visually Impaired Person (VIP) since the Braille makes the way to literacy, knowledge, information, intellectual freedom, equal opportunity, personal security, and others. But VIP is facing challenges in learning Braille, such as low tactile acuity, finger sensitivity, memorization skill, motivation, and profoundly emotional issues which especially affect the beginner level of Braille learning. The beginner level comes to the most difficult step in learning Braille especially for adult VIP, so they need more time and more practice in the Braille shape recognizing step. In learning beginner Braille, VIP is assisted with a Teacher of Visually Impaired (TVI) from formal school or visual impairment community. But not all VIP could get access to have TVI due to the overage of VIP for formal school, a limited TVI working time, or even due to a lack of human resources of TVI itself. This research is trying to improve the chances for VIP to learn Braille by developing an android application which is expected to help them in learning beginner Braille independently in an easy and affordable way so they could have more Braille practice even without a TVI around. In addition, this research also develops a beginner level of Braille book so the VIP could experience the real Braille touching in learning. The main feature of the application is to translate the written Braille on the book into speech so VIP could know whether they are correct or not in reading the Braille. The input data of the application is a Braille-image taken by the auto-captured feature of the application and the converted into a speech as the output to let the VIP knows the correct reading of the written Braille. The application is able to translate the Braille into a speech successfully.