A Text Reader for the Visually Impaired using Raspberry Pi

Abstract

The challenges faced by the visually impaired people in reading printed texts in their day-today life are often not well understood. This paper is based on a prototype which helps the user to listen to the contents of the text images in English and Tamil. It involves extraction of text from the image and converting the text to translated audio output in the languages mentioned above. This is done using Raspberry Pi 3 model B and a camera module with the concepts of Tesseract OCR [Optical Character Recognition] engine and Google Speech API [Application Program Interface] which is the textual input to speech engine. The model is programmed using Python language. It is portable and easy to use thus providing a better reading experience to the visually challenged people as enjoyed by their sighted peers.