Assistive Mobile Application for Visually Impaired People

Abstract

According to the World Health Organization estimation, globally the number of people with some visual impairment is estimated to be 285 million, of whom 39 million are blind.  The inability to use features such as sending and reading of email, schedule management, pathfinding or outdoor navigation, and reading SMS is a disadvantage for blind people in many professional and educational situations. Speech or text analysis can help improve support for visually-impaired people. Users can speak a command to perform a task. The spoken command will be interpreted by the Speech Recognition Engine (SRE) and can be converted into text or perform suitable actions. In this paper, an application that allows schedule management, emailing, and SMS reading completely based on voice command is proposed, implemented, and validated. The System hopes to provide blind people to simply speak the desired functionality and be guided thereby the system’s audio instructions. The proposed and designed app is implemented to support three languages which are English, Hindi, and Kannada.