ARET - Automatic Reading of Educational Texts for Visually Impaired Students

This paper deals with a presentation of an application which was developed to help in education of visually impaired pupils at a secondary school, i.e. at the pupils' age of 12 to 14 years. The web-based application integrates speech and language technologies to make the education easier in several areas, e.g. in mathematics, physics, chemistry or languages (Czech, English, German). TTS system is used for automatic reading of educational texts and it makes use of a special preprocessing of the texts, namely any formulas which may occur therein. The application is used by both teachers to create and manage the teaching material and pupils to view and listen to the prepared material. The application is currently being used by one special school for visually impaired pupils in daily lessons.