Improving reading machines for the blind with interactive document segmentation
✍ Scribed by Urs A. Müller; Markus Schenkel
- Publisher
- Elsevier Science
- Year
- 1993
- Weight
- 345 KB
- Volume
- 16
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0745-7138
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✦ Synopsis
Thanks to the progress in the field of optical character recognition during the past years, the recognition abilities of reading machines for the blind could also be improved a great deal. However, documents with a complicated structure or ones that are poorly legible often become uninterpretable for the machine. In any event, the reading machine cannot replace a sighted person. The following paper explores a method whereby blind people may interact with the reading machine by a tactile reprint of the original document put on a touch sensitive device. The prototype of such a device was designed and built at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zuerich, Switzerland (ETH Zuerich) whete it also underwent testing by various members of the blind community.