BLIND READER

Abstract

Textbooks are a great source of information that shows us knowledge. The number of textbooks in the world is more than 1 billion from the 2010 survey however, only 6 million e-books are only available now. The visually impaired can only understand braille textbooks and they could hear e-books, unlikely the number of braille textbooks is limited and the cost of converting normal textbooks to braille books is not affordable. Education is considered the most important element in human life, it is this education that we receive today which will shape our tomorrow. But if we think about the visually impaired people, they never get the same level of education nor get to know about it only because they are blind. The project is aimed to help the visually impaired to help gain information from textbooks using a microcontroller. The microcontroller is attached to scanning equipment made of plywood and the board is connected with a camera that helps to scan the document. Our project tries to help a group of people in a particular blind school. The project aims to assist the students as well as teachers to help them in their teaching process. In our work, we build a piece of equipment for scanning documents that can make the job easy for visually impaired people, especially students. We know that initially, it would be a hard job for them to make use of it but in the end, once they get used to it, it would serve the purpose that it was meant for. The vision of creating this project is just the beginning and what I have built is just a primary version of what it is supposed to be it requires a normal person without visual impairment to adjust the focus which is its limitation and that will be overcome in future. We tried to build equipment that is supposed to serve the purpose. The design and specialties of the equipment will decide how the project becomes a success or a failure. The input is taken in the form of an image captured from the web camera or pi camera using a press button. This image is then processed for text reading using OCR software. The Raspberry Pi acts as the microcontroller for processing the entire process. The text reading is supported by software named OCR(optical character recognition). The read text is changed into an audio output using the TTS(Text To Speech) Synthesis. Other dependencies required for the process include Tesseract Library.