Voice Helper: A Mobile Assistive System for Visually Impaired Persons

In this information society, visually impaired persons need assistive tools for operating digital devices so that they could get and apply digital information while learning, living and working. The reader, which transforms digital information to text and then to voice by TTS (Text-To-Speech), is widely used to help visually impaired persons to operate devices. This paper focused on designing and implementing an assistive system for visually impaired persons while using Android smart phones. The system, Voice Helper (VH), integrates open sources and also enhances many functions of them. VH includes the message reader, text file reader, OCR reader, voice dialer and visually disabled dialer to facilitate daily activities for visually impaired persons. In addition, it provides the Navigation Reader for walking and riding, which is based on Google Maps and supports more detailed voice guidance for the distance to a destination and directions of moving. The operating environment of VH is integrated and verified by visually impaired persons.