Embedded reading device for blind people: a user-centered design

A handheld PDA-based system is being developed to help blind people in their daily tasks. The design combines in a continuous process users' involvement and engineers' effort. This interaction is made efficient thanks to a specialist able to communicate with both parties and to extract useful knowledge for them. The system can be viewed as a main loop including the user taking the snapshot, text/picture detection, optical character recognition, text-to-speech synthesis, feedback to the user, until a useful output is reached. Each task is carried out by algorithms integrating both technical performance and user requirements.