Development of an Open Source Urdu Screen Reader for Visually Impaired People

Speech technology has enabled computer accessibility for users with visual impairments but the language barrier poses a great challenge. This project is an effort to overcome the hurdles faced by visually impaired people, in terms of language barrier, by providing them access to digital information through software which can communicate with them in Urdu. A survey was conducted in schools for blind to assess their information and communication needs. The survey helped to deduce the learning abilities, competency level and usability requirements of visually impaired children. An open source screen reader, NVDA was localized and afterwards integrated with Urdu text-to-speech system. The system was deployed in a school of visually impaired children where they participated in training and testing of the system. Results showed that visually impaired children performed equally well and in some cases even better with the localized screen reader as compared to an English screen reader.