EasyVoice: Breaking Barriers for People with Voice Disabilities

Text-to-speech technology has been broadly used to help people with voice disabilities to overcome their difficulties. With text-to-speech, a person types at a keyboard, the text is synthesized, and the sound comes out through the computer speakers. In recent years, Voice over IP (VoIP) applications have become very popular and have been used by people worldwide. These applications allow people to talk for free over the Internet and also to make traditional calls through the Public-Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) at a small fraction of the cost offered by traditional phone companies. This paper presents an application, called EasyVoice, that integrates different systems to allow a person with motor impairment and voice disabilities to talk with another person located anywhere in the world.

[1]  John Riley,et al.  Tim Berners-Lee , 1998 .

[2]  Philippe BOISSIERE boissier.  An Overview of Existing Writing Assistance Systems , 2003 .

[3]  Shumin Zhai,et al.  The metropolis keyboard - an exploration of quantitative techniques for virtual keyboard design , 2000, UIST '00.

[4]  Fernando G. Lobo,et al.  Breaking barriers for people with voice disabilities: Combining virtual keyboards with speech synthesizers, and VoIP applications , 2006, ArXiv.

[5]  Upkar Varshney,et al.  Voice over IP , 2002, CACM.

[6]  Jeni Simpson,et al.  Inclusive Information and Communication Technologies for People with Disabilities , 2009 .

[7]  Fernando G. Lobo,et al.  EasyVoice: integrating voice synthesis with Skype , 2007, Assets '07.

[8]  Mark Fischetti,et al.  Weaving the web - the original design and ultimate destiny of the World Wide Web by its inventor , 1999 .

[9]  Fernando G. Lobo,et al.  Information and communication technologies for people with disabilities , 2004 .

[10]  Kathleen F. McCoy,et al.  Generating text from compressed input: an intelligent interface for people with severe motor impairments , 1992, CACM.

[11]  Joseph P. Olive,et al.  Text-to-speech synthesis , 1995, AT&T Technical Journal.

[12]  Ravi Jain,et al.  An Experimental Study of the Skype Peer-to-Peer VoIP System , 2005, IPTPS.

[13]  Päivi Majaranta,et al.  Twenty years of eye typing: systems and design issues , 2002, ETRA.

[14]  Paul Taylor,et al.  Text-to-Speech Synthesis , 2009 .

[15]  Julia Hirschberg,et al.  Progress in speech synthesis , 1997 .

[16]  Bob Hok Kwan Yu,et al.  Voice over IP , 2006 .

[17]  Paulseph-John Farrugia,et al.  Text to Speech Technologies for Mobile Telephony Services , 2003 .