Interface Model for Blind and Visually Impaired for Albanian language
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Keywords:
Interface, Blind, Albanian, Text To Speech, Synthetized SpeechAbstract
Being able to read text, find out information and know about the latest news has always been a
challenge for those who cannot access the printed version, such as the blind and visually-impaired.
The advent of internet and advancements in User Interfaces (UIs) as well as in assistive technologies make this
challenge increasingly feasible. A lot of effort has gone into making software applications and web pages more
accessible to the blind and visually impaired students. There are few Windows based stand-alone text-to-speech
screen reader applications that provide application-specific speech output through script files written
specifically for them. All these screen readers usually cover widely speaking languages. Albanian language is
not covered with no one of the screen readers.
In this paper a new user-interface model for Albanian speaking blind and visually impaired is
presented. The new model is built up on the research results and testing with different screen readers and
different groups of blind and visually impaired Albanian speaking students, the screen readers analysis, text
to-speech technologies analysis, specially developed text-to-speech generator from Albanian texts, the
mathematical analysis done on general Albanian texts as well as the basic principles of lexicons creations. It
has been tested to blind and visually impaired science students. The new user-interface model is a very useful
tool for Albanian-speaking blind and visually impaired science students giving them an equal studying
opportunity as the other students.
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